Birthdays

It’s my daughter L’s birthday today. There was much talk on the bus about presents this morning, what was received, what is still wanted. L’s older sister R is the last of my three to have her birthday and she said to me:

“Mummy, there are two things that I want for my birthday that I don’t think I’ll get. They are an end to the war in Syria, and Donald Trump not being elected anymore.”

Sweet but meaningless. I agreed that she was unlikely to get either. I explained a little about the US electoral system, didn’t even attempt to explain Syria because I can’t, I just don’t know enough to answer the questions that will surely come if I talk about the little I do know. But (as bloody always) it made me think. Are we completely powerless? We all wish for world peace like beauty queens, but what do we DO? Is there anything that I can give to R to do. It’s good to want what she wants, but wanting without action is meaningless. She’s only ten though. Where do her responsibilities lie?

I try to teach the children to be kind. I think that is something crucial that IS always in their power to choose to be. Nothing R can do can change the multiple cruelties done each moment to men, women, children, brothers, sisters, grandparents, in Syria, things I can imagine but I don’t want her to quite yet. But she can be kind to her siblings, to her friends and school mates, to strangers in the street, even to me. That matters. That makes the small geography she inhabits a little better. Does it have any effect on Syria, or those whom Syria touches? Possibly not.

I was reminded, when thinking about what R had said about my friend LC in Los Angeles. A smart, committed left-wing Jewish woman, someone who actually did things, went to prisons to protest executions, she said to me, with a certain amount of pride in her voice, that her teenage niece was no longer able to believe in God after 9/11.

“Really?”

I said.

“So she didn’t have any trouble with the Holocaust then?”

I could see LC was offended, so I didn’t push it. Maybe I should have because it was absolutely what I thought. I used the Holocaust because we were both Jewish but it could (maybe it should ) have been anything else, the death of Russians under Stalin, the decimation of the Native American population, the number of children lost, just that year, to gun crime in the USA, the number of people lost in the grim misery of the drug trade in pretty much any South American country,  earthquakes in Iran or Japan, famine in Africa, children killed in car crashes, children dying of leukemia (or of anything), parents dying of lukemia, lonely people dying all by themselves of lukemia and never even being missed. Why do things only matter when they feel like they affect us?

I don’t think I feel the same pride I heard in LC’s voice when I write about R’s birthday wish. What I want to do is understand where responsibility lies and the how to deal with it, seeing as I feel so much of it myself. To understand if there is anything I can actually do, and then try (as LC actually did) to do it. Which is what this, here now on the screen, is all about. I can continue trying to be kind, but I can also write. I can try and write out my confusion and my ideas, and hopefully it can take me somewhere that translates out of birthday wishes and into action. It feels very small now. I know how to write, and I think this blog is live, but I haven’t quite figured out how to find it on-line, an address for it to give out, even quite how to put a title in. But I can learn those things in time, and even small and better than nothing at all.

 

 

First blog post

Tell people why

‘Click the edit link to tell people why you started this blog and what you want to do with it’ say WordPress, helpfully. The blog was a suggestion by my husband, J. He also said, later that day, that I  like to be told what to do, which I found a little insulting, but also true. Maybe following WordPress’ advice is sensible because though I call myself a writer, the blank page often troubles me, and sometimes it’s better to jump into the middle of the conversation rather than worry too much. J and I were having one of the meeting that we try to have quarterly, to look at our lives, and our children’s, and see how we think it’s all going and what needs to change and who needs help. We try to do them on the equinoxes and solstices but we were a week late this time. We dropped the children off at school and then walked, along the New River, through the squares of Islington, along the canal and (among other things) I tried to explain the sense of despair I feel when I think about the future, and specifically about the state of the environment, or the planet, or global warming or whatever you choose to call it. Where it’s all heading.

None of this was new to him. It’s been on our minds for years, and we often talk of it. He addresses many of the issues directly in his life as an architect, and I am often jealous of his ability not be totally thrown into my kind of paralytic despondency by what we both see happening. My own responses have been intensifying over the last months. It’s not just the headlines and the articles that often find I simply cannot get to the end off. It’s now everywhere I look, in every breath. Crossing a road one the late afternoon, I looked down it’s long length to where it ended in a large four lane street. The fat orange sun was setting, slotting itself very neatly between the buildings that rise on either side, a big old egg yolk slipping down to the ashfelt. It was both beautiful and somehow alarming, and I wanted to film it for a project, so I stood on the island in the middle of the road, just where I was, and held up my phone while the cars passed me on either side. With every breath the smell of the air, which was heavy and acrid and left behind a strange, heavy viscosity, made me more and more downcast that by the time I stopped filming I felt so completely submerged in hopelessness that I struggled to even talk for the rest of th evening. “Is it something I did?” J asked.

One of the hardest elements of this is how powerless I feel to impact any change. If there is one thing I can be sure of it is that I would fail in politics. I’m shy, uncertain, hate crowds, can barely organise a birthday party. I vote, religiously, and think I understand both how much and how little my vote counts. But I need to do something, as I explained to J, and I told him the things I was thinking, and the actions I’d already integrated into the way I try to live, and what it made me think about our lives, my life, what we do. And he suggested I wrote about it in a blog, which is also something to do, and doing seems desperately important, which is why this, here, now.