I’m starting to regret having children. This is, for me, the most extreme side effect of peering over the abyss created by Putin’s war. The future – already so much less promising for my children’s generation than it was for mine – is suddenly darkened by terrors beyond any that I expected to arise in my own lifetime, or theirs.
Will my boys, my sweet, bookish boys, have to fight for freedom in Europe? Or my girl, for that matter: she’s brave and combative, and I can see her leading a tank battalion.
But – these are the mental calculations I find myself doing in the middle of the night, in my safe bed in a safe country, for now – my daughter is only 10. The boys are more likely to become eligible for conscription before World War III is over. And that is assuming we haven’t all been nuked first. Which no longer feels like a safe assumption to make.
Even in the best circumstances, parenthood renders you exquisitely vulnerable to events beyond your control. It’s like unzipping your belly and sending your vital organs out into the world. But worse, because at least if something terrible happened to my liver it would probably kill me. If something terrible happens to my child, I will have to live with it.
You have children, in part, to claim a stake in the future. But it also means being taken hostage by the future. Those of us who came of age in the optimistic Eighties and Nineties, at the so-called “end of history”, are not accustomed to living with existential dread.
But in recent years it has become apparent that the worst can, and in fact does, happen.
Watching the terrible footage coming out of Ukraine I feel – along with choking pity and dread – shame at my own naivety. How could I have reproduced so blithely? How did I fail to notice (or rather, to heed) the rising swell of current events into which my children would be born?
It makes me love them more than ever. I clasp them to me, wriggling disconsolately, and sniff the tops of their heads, and swoon with tenderness, and wish – just a bit – they had never been born.
Book Smart
To celebrate World Book Day – an odd way to mark it, in my view – the comedy channel Dave has commissioned an opinion poll about boring books. The survey of 2,000 Britons found that 95 per cent struggled to get through old books, and almost half were prepared to lie about having read the classics.
I suspect they may even be lying about which books they’ve tried and failed to read.
No one who had actually cracked the narrow spine of Animal Farm could call it a difficult book to get through. Yet it ranks at number five on Dave’s list of classics that are too hard to finish. That’s a nonsensical two places higher than Les Miserables: one of the longest and most daunting novels ever written.
My husband has taken to listening to the audiobook of Les Mis on big car journeys. It’s 69 hours long, and has a miraculous effect on the children: the moment they start squabbling or moaning, he snaps on Victor Hugo – usually in the middle of a digressive essay about monastic hierarchies or the Parisian sewers – and they slump back in their seats, comatose. A book worth sticking with to the end, I think.
