Finding perspective

Written last week

So now I’m back, albeit with luck, temporarily, on the mum circuit dropping off and picking up the kids from school, hanging about in the park afterwards, generally catching up with some old faces, two things have struck me: one is that even in progressive Hackney, at a progressive school, overwhelmingly the parents or carers at the gates are women. There are more dads doing drop off, but the ones who find it economically viable to be there at 3.30pm, or rather, more economically viable than working and paying for childcare are women, as in, this afternoon, 99 percent. Which goes to show that gender inequality is roaring in the capital. The second? That everyone is dealing with something.

Take Paola, an older mother from Turkey. We’ve always passed the time of day as her son, Deniz, is Down’s Syndrome. In Jonah’s class at school, we were in the mummy trenches at the same time, she seemed particularly stoic in the face of her son’s difficulties. Yet she had more sympathy than many for me, wrestling with Jonah’s tantrums in public. Her son’s more visible disorder may perhaps elicit more visible support, but we had a grim empathy for each other. At the park today after school, she and her husband both taking turns pushing Denis on the large swing, she has high hopes for his future. Her son, friendly and gregarious, came up and started asking me questions about Johnny Milton, who I’d smuggled into to the playground and was sitting on my lap on the park bench. Progress may be slow, but progress there was.

Then along came Roy with his second adopted son, born, like Roy’s previous, to a drug addict mother with social problems, this little 16 month old bruiser is a natural with a football, and healthy as you like. Roy’s partner John has just set up a sort of “dating agency” for potential adopters and adoptees,(I will add the link as soon as I know it) cutting out a lot of time wasting paper work where information quickly goes out of date. Only in it’s first week, it’s having lots of success and not just among the gay community who Roy and his partner have been particularly instrumental in efforts to support potential adopters. It was genuinely heart melting to see them looking so happy – if not a little exhausted. We sat in the park, while Jonah and Ava played with their new Minecraft keyrings with a boy from his class, who Jonah had previously reported as giving him a hard time. They seemed to be getting on alright.

I spoke to the school’s SENCO at school about getting Jonah referred to a school psychologist for repeated angry episodes at school, and Sally, probably a bit on the spectrum herself, sympathised with Jonah being invisible – because he’s bright and articulate, it can be hard for normal, everyday people to recognise that he’s finding a particular social situation tough or be able to find his way out of a situation.

But then, everyone’s got their difficulties, as Roy pointed out, when I asked him whether it worried him, what the mother of his child might have taken when pregnant with Roy’s adopted son. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do about it. We just have to deal with whatever behaviour results as it comes. There’s no point agonising over what might be the cause.”

This seems to me to be a good philosophy for life: to deal with shit as it come, don’t dwell on the past or agonise about the future. To recognise that other people have challenges and to try not to judge. But as ever it seems it’s the ones who’ve experienced hard times and challenges who are ofetn the most understanding.

I write this on the day a woman is charged with killing three of her severely disabled children. My heart goes out to her, but there will be many who judge her for her actions. People who breeze through life seem to think that others can, or worse, should.