The Sophist 1: The one about feeling completely terrible about what's going on

This week I fucking hate being somebody’s mother. This week I want to sit on my bed with a laptop in front of me, refreshing the page, rocking backwards and forwards on news websites, on Facebook, Twitter, CNN, the BBC, nursing the gutpunch in my belly from the American election. I don’t want to go to bed, I want to sit with these bad feelings and roll deep inside them until I find a new breath. But every day this week I also have to take my kid to school and then do my work and then bring her back into my wretched arms again.

How can I tell her it gets better when it doesn’t? How can I tell myself that this will be over by Monday and I’ll be cheerful again, when the new presidency hasn’t even begun, and it won’t, and I won’t. What is this bullshit balancing act, where one part of me is preaching peace, muttering Om Shanti repeatedly, while the other side of me is pure rage, hissing through my teeth NO PASARÁN. And then the third part of me, the self-consciousness, is asking me why I’m only allowed to vent emotionally through the medium of foreign languages, like some kind of exotic tourist into the world of having feelings. I think it’s because I come from Yorkshire. I have to take all the exotic tourism into having feelings that I can get.

And so I got up this morning and got my five-year-old dressed, washed, fed, cheered, and rallied emotionally. Able to face another day at the school that she doesn’t want to go to, despite being a success story there, a bright and sociable kid, because she has only learned to put on a show of being a bright and sociable kid, when really she would rather stay at home with her mummy where it is warm and there is flapjack. Childhood is performative. And so, against all the rules, I let her take her teddy bear with her today, because she knew that something was up. They can tell when you’re breathing wrong, even if they don’t like to mention it.

I asked her last night if she knew who Donald Trump was, and she said no, then yes, then said her teacher at school had explained that he was the man who tried to blow up the building next to Big Ben. And I thought to myself, fucking hell, DID HE? Trying desperately to remember if he’d been involved in some weird Thames waterfront development plot that I’d forgotten. And then I went, hang on a minute, babe, do you mean Guy Fawkes? And she went “Yes! THAT’S his name.” And then she started singing “Remember, remember the first of December,” and I said, “It’s the fifth of November, it’s Bonfire Night, it was last week,” and she said “No it isn’t, it’s the first of December,” and then I thought oh what’s the sodding point, so I joined in chanting it too. And now, in our house, we are remembering the 1st of December, and I don’t know why, but for a few moments it really gave me something to look forward to. I may even bake a cake. I mean, in this new, post-facts reality, where TV stars accidentally get given countries, the entirely meaningless celebrations of the 1st of December could really catch on?

So I didn’t tell her who Trump was. I didn’t tell her that magic powers had been given to a man with something shaky in his brain, a vial of poison behind his eyes. A man who now thinks he has the biggest penis in the world, and that penises, when they get that big, can be very, very cruel. I didn’t tell her that he’s one of those men who looks at little girls like her and sizes up the curvature of her legs and the yellowness of her hair and imagines his eyes bearing down upon her flesh when she is older. Just a little older. I didn’t tell her that he’s a man who got his magic powers from telling the cogs in the wheels that they are being treated like cogs in wheels, before driving his jeep around with them. That he has taken the white man’s fear of everybody else, the basest part of himself, and turned it into the fucking birthday cake.

And I don’t want to tell her that it was women, racist white women, who voted for that man too, despite the way his eyes bear down upon their flesh, because they are so, so used to that particular kind of shit. The idea that they should put sexual assault at the top of their concerns - I mean, it isn’t the top of anybody else’s concerns, why would it be theirs? It wasn’t the top of their mother’s concerns when they told them it had happened to them. Their fathers didn’t do anything about it. Their teachers didn’t do anything about it. Their bosses didn’t do anything about it. How would they know to list it, after all this time, as a primary concern? Even the most loving, enlightened families want you to shush now about all that stuff. Keep it down. You’re embarrassing us. Move on.

And I certainly don’t want to tell my daughter that she is the generation to change all this - because I was the generation to change all this. I grew up sitting on my dad’s shoulders on CND marches and rolling bits of Blu-tak onto posters for the Labour party. (In fact, due to my close observation of the political landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, I spent an inexplicably large part of my childhood wondering what I would do if I, like Terry Waite, were in Beirut, chained to a radiator. Which led me to a lifelong fascination with hostage situations, and ended with me starting the Instagram hashtag #celebritiesinhostagesituations, for which I can only apologise.)

Well the truth is that I’m exhausted. I can’t do it. I don’t want my daughter to know what’s going on. I want her to keep playing with her stupid Girls World doll in her stupid pink bedroom that she longed for so much / because it turns out little girls want what little girls want / are told to want / and there’s no point trying to talk them out of their own desires and tastes / what good is that, to teach her that she doesn’t want what she has told you that she wants / let them have their stupid pink.

It turns out that I am too exhausted to do punctuation properly. I want her to live in blissful ignorance forever.

It also turns out that I would also quite like to have sex this week, but I don’t have anyone to have sex with at present, so I have found myself punching the staircase instead. I won’t say it was an entirely similar experience, but the desire to lie down in a darkened room afterwards was definitely relatable.

Next week I will be more cheerful and tell you all about Plato.

xx

Illustration by the wonderful Loulou Androlia, www.louiseandrolia.com