'It was a lot of responsibility!' Loreen recalls having to help her mother out as the eldest of five
Eurovision star Loreen has opened up about her upbringing as the eldest of five children with a "warrior" of a single mother.
Loreen had "a lot of responsibility" as a child because she had to look after her siblings.
The 39-year-old Swedish pop star - who won 'The Eurovision Song Contest' earlier this year with dance track 'Tattoo - was brought up with a single mother in the city of Västerås as the eldest of five children and explained that she doesn't cook "very much" these days because she often stepped had to step up to the plate as a teenager when Choumicha went to work.
Speaking on the 'Table Manners' podcast, she told hosts Jessie and Lennie Ware: "My mum is a good cook, but she raised a daughter who is not! To be completely honest, we were a big family. Five siblings and my mother raised us by herself so you can imagine, we had to take care of each other so I think the reason that I don't cook food that very much in my grown life is because I did it that much as a kid.
"I was helping my mother out, cooking for my siblings. I did bolognese, I had chicken, the whole chicken in the oven thing, I was very good at that...anything. I was the eldest, so there was a lot [of responsibility] but as a child you don't really think about it, you just adapt. So whenever my mother wasn't home, then, well, it was me. She worked a lot."
The 'Euphoria' singer went on to add that her mother - who immigrated to Sweden from a "poor" Moroccan village when she herself was a teenager - has a "very interesting" story and described her as a "warrior" who made her own upbringing "very special."
She added: "She was a healthcare worker. At the same time, she went to school, she has a very interesting story my mother. She had me when she was 16 in Stockholm but she lived in a very poor village in Morocco, so she fleed when she was 14, all by herself. The beauty is you can see what women can do. We're such a powerful species, we really are. But she hasn't talked about all those things, she met my father in Spain and he lived in Sweden. One funny thing she told me because she didn't have any education was that she thought that the world was just Spain, France and Germany so for many years she thought she was in Germany when she was in Sweden until she got an education. She's a warrior, I've had a very special upbringing. The positive thing is that because she was basically a child, there were so many rules I never learned!"
