I’m angry and I don’t know where to put it. I’ve made the mistake of reading something before bed, which has left me so enraged, I can’t sit still. I kiss my son’s forehead as he sleeps, which helps a little, but angry I remain. I will share this anger with you.
Unless you count my years-long stand against the hellish libertarian dystopia that is Paw Patrol, I don’t bring politics into this column if I can help it and generally bore people with my reactions to current events elsewhere. Parenting does, of course, have many political dimensions, not least since so many people become more politically active upon becoming parents. Sometimes this effect seems slightly myopic, like with those audience members on Question Time who preface the most self-serving statement you’ve ever heard with: ‘Speaking as a parent’.
Were I to measure such a thing, my own political engagement has probably lessened a tiny bit since having kids. Most of this is down to logistics as I am, basically, exhausted all the time, and lack the bandwidth I once allocated to getting into fights on Twitter, or researching the vagaries of international relations and political theory.
Even if none of that were the case, this column is short and has a tone of its own, and where other writers and activists document, say, the exorbitant rise in the cost of baby formula and childcare, or the deleterious conditions for working mothers in this country, I promote those pieces where I can, and keep things on this page a little lighter – a space where the humdrum horrors of the world needn’t intrude, not just yet.
And then I read about the Home Office scrubbing cartoons from the wall of a migrant children’s intake centre in Dover, and another in Kent the same week. I think of the children who find themselves there, ranging in age from babies to teenagers, many unaccompanied by parents who, we can presume, did not make it.
I look at my own children, sleeping complacently in warm beds, and think of what I’d do to protect and keep them safe, had life placed me in more desperate straits. Had I not, by sheer accident of birth, landed in a place which, for all its ills, was not a constant, destabilising threat to our lives. A place so safe I can moan about my own nonexistent family strife for a living.
I imagine, for the microsecond I can stand it, having to bet everything on reaching such a place through treacherous waters, hoping against hope that, even if I didn’t make it, the people on those shores would treat those children, my whole world, with dignity and love.
Then I imagine, for the millisecond I can stand it, witnessing those children’s unfathomable despair and deciding, with a miser’s calculus, to deny them even the smallest crumb of human comfort. And my eyes sting from anger. From a hatred so pure it scares me, towards such needless, deliberate cruelty. And I realise I do not ever want to be so exhausted, or merely content in my own life, that the thought of such a thing does not leave me trembling with rage and willing to break the pattern of this column to say so.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
