Politicians are well-known for beginning any comment on an issue by reminding their audience that they have a personal connection to the story. If they’re asked about violence against women, they will respond that “as a husband and father of daughters” (because they’re mostly dude-blokes), they really care about this. This response always gets derided on social media, and with good reason. You shouldn’t have to share your home with a female person to care about them being attacked and murdered. You don’t need relationship qualifications to care about other people.
And yet.
I don’t want to side with male politicians (or many female ones, for that matter), because I think they’re mostly out for themselves and the cash and nothing else (not even those female people they share one of their houses with), but I have realised something since having children. Being a parent does make these issues matter in a whole different way. No, you don’t have to have children to care about children, or women, or the fact that the world is on actual fire. You don’t have to be a parent to know that violence and war and poverty and abuse are horrible. I know plenty of people who don’t have children and who care deeply about these things and do what they can to help. It’s not that you suddenly develop a heart when you have children. But something does happen when you become a parent - when you go through the tearing apart of your body, mind and life that it takes to make a baby, when you are ripped open by the pain and joy and devastation and love of parenthood, when your soul is lifted outside your body, your innermost self becomes open to the world. When you become a mother, your heart becomes an open wound. You do, to quote Leona, bleed love. You don’t suddenly develop the capacity for caring, but the intensity and abundance of the caring and love that you now experience makes you susceptible to a whole new kind of pain.
The tragedies of the world are no longer horrible in the abstract - they are visceral; they hurt, badly.
Any bombing, murder, attack, trafficking, drowning, disappearance is suddenly one of which you can picture your precious baby as a victim. This child, that you love more than your own life and that you are constantly terrified will be hurt or killed or lost, that you picture, often and against your will, suffering brutal harm because the purpose of your life is now to be constantly vigilant for potential catastrophes in order to keep them safe, so that you are now exhausted and heartbroken from imagining so much pain for the person you love most in the world… when the news talks about death and destruction, it is their face you see.
I opted out of watching the news for a long time. I deleted the news apps from my phone, I stopped following journalists on social media. There is a lot of talk about it being an important form of self-care to step away from the constant talk of death and tragedy, and I thought that’s what I was doing - taking care of myself. But now I’m not so sure. 24-hour rolling news is overwhelming and largely unnecessary. The pressure for news channels and sites to maintain constant coverage leads to all sorts of unhelpful conjecture and catastrophising, and the discourse is becoming more and more polarised because sensationalism and outrage is profitable in the attention economy. So yes, we can all benefit by moderating our exposure to the news. But stepping away completely isn’t a solution. We can’t shut ourselves in our (relatively) privileged bubbles and just refuse to see. Ignorance isn’t a virtue, and it does everyone a disservice, including ourselves. We need to keep our eyes open to the world, we need to allow ourselves to feel the pain of what’s going on out there, and we need to show up in the world informed by that knowledge.
I’m not going to say that I care more - about Gaza or Ukraine or refugees or climate change or any of what is happening around the world - than people without children, but right now my heart hurts in a very specific way. My heart hurts imagining the pain of the mothers mourning their children, or the children left without mothers. My heart hurts thinking about the future we are leaving (or not leaving) for our children.
Maybe that’s a selfish way to care about these situations. Maybe I’m thinking about myself and my own grief, or fear of grief, instead of centring the people caught up in these conflicts or suffering the impact of these crises. But it’s almost impossible not to empathise with a pain that you are constantly afraid of, that you can visualise all too vividly. It’s hard not to put that sense of connection with those other mothers, that shared experience, that deep and complex emotional state of motherhood that no one really understands except the people who have known it for themselves, at the heart of everything.
So my heart hurts right now. I want to hold all the mothers who are grieving, and all the scared and traumatised children. I want to reach out a hand to help. But how? What the fuck can we do? I feel so powerless.
Those politicians don’t seem to listen to us all that much. And they’re more interested in squabbling amongst themselves than in enacting any real change. There’s nothing in it for them - war is good for business, blaming refugees for their own failings wins votes, and fighting climate change isn’t popular with their corporate donors.
If they won’t do anything, who will?
Part of me feels that we should all be on the streets. Protests, strikes, mass action. I marched against the war in Iraq 20 years ago, shouldn’t I be out there now? But taking action feels very different as a mother. I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old who need me, most of the day and night. When could I go out to protest? I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable taking them with me in case of trouble, and they’d get bored and want to go home pretty quickly anyway. Plus joining a protest would probably mean a three-hour round trip to London - not great for small children, and a lot of time for me to spend away from them.
Protests scare me a lot, anyway. When I have been previously, it has been accompanied by friends or boyfriends that I felt protected by. But my friends now mostly have kids - and therefore all the same problems I listed above - and if I’m out, my husband will need to look after the kids so he can’t come. And big crowds of people I don’t know, full of noise, ALL BY MYSELF is an overwhelming thought for my neurodivergent brain.
So what do I do? What do any of us do?
I feel like I should have an answer here. A call to arms, a neat conclusion to draw this piece to that will either rally you all to action or explain my personal epiphany and next steps. But I don’t have any of that. I wondered if I should put this piece out there at all, given that it defies the expectation of a conclusion. If I were submitting this to one of the newspaper editors I work with, they would send it back with a note saying, “So what do you think should be done?” I’ve got nothing. But I’m putting it out there anyway - rules be damned - in the hope that we can figure this out together. In the hope that there’s enough people out there who feel like me, whose hearts are breaking and who want to channel that pain into something positive, to enable us to collaborate on a solution. If we put our heads together, maybe we can find a path.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and some invention is pretty fucking necessary right now - and if anyone’s good at invention and creation, it’s the mothers.
So I want to open the floor to all of you - what can we do? How can we help? Is there a way to make the world better for all the mothers, all the children, all the humans? I’d love to bring us all together as a collective - as mothers who feel this pain in a specific way, and who can work together to do what we can, in whatever way we can that feels manageable amongst all the other demands and restrictions of our lives. Maybe, sometimes, coming together, holding space for one another, is what we can do. Maybe that’s the first step. Maybe there are more steps that come next.
How do we make it all better?
I think you echo what so many of us feel. How do we make it better? As a mother, grandmother and child psychotherapist, I feel strongly that we need to nurture a next generation whose souls are listened to and nourished. Too many souls get buried, dismissed, squashed before they even begin to grow. To quote Mother Theresa (I think): 'if you want to heal the world, go home and love your family'. I have a vision, and am working on a book, to encourage the flourishing of souls, our own and those that come after us. If we can create a world where souls can flourish, surely we can break the cycle of isolation and despair that leads to so much violence. That is my dream anyway!
And here is a poem I wrote in response to one of @bethkempton's prompts - 'Scattered' - last Autumn which tried to express how I was, and am still, feeling:
Picking through the scattered rubble of shattered lives
Families in fragments
Searching, searching
For a hint of lives lost, for a flicker of life found.
Dust in every pore.
Scattered, shattered
In the name of the Gods of War.
No absolute rights, no absolute wrongs, no absolute truth.
Images of agony fill the headlines as day passes into day.
But we all hold the blame.
For eyes turned away.
For lives lived in ignorance
Of a world, shattered, scattered.
We all share the responsibility! Sorry, rant over! And thank you for your post.
So many awful things happening, so much uncertainty, and yes that feeling of helplessness mixed with compassion. I have no answers either but really appreciate you writing this. 🙏🏻💛