MANCHESTER, MY DAUGHTER AND ME
What are parents to do, in the face of terror? I can’t be sentimental and fearful
The pictures are what get to me.
The very first time I saw the photo of Alan Kurdi face down on a Turkish beach at the water’s edge, I thought I was going to throw up. Alan was the same age as my son, and in death he was lying in a position familiar to anyone who has ever seen a toddler collapse face down in post-play exhaustion.
Then there’s the shot of fiveyear-old Omran Daqneesh sitting in an ambulance, covered in dust and blood after being rescued from the rubble of an airstrike in Aleppo. He has a dazed look on his face, sheer bewilderment at what has happened to him.
There have been fewer such pictures out of Manchester Arena, and I haven’t found the stomach to search out the ones that are circulating. But my eyes and thoughts keep coming back to the photo of eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos, in a red shirt and a black dress, her lips pursed in that shy sort of half-smile kids give when they’re being told to hold still and smile for the camera.
Eight years old. That’s right around the time when the raw potentialities of childhood start to give way to the possibilities of adolescence, when the sharp lines of innocence begin to take on the rougher contours of experience. Saffie Roussos was the youngest person killed in the attack, and she was someone’s sweet little girl. But she might have been my sweet little girl, and just thinking about it drives me to the brink of madness.
I came to parenting late in the game. And through the extended adolescence that was my 30s, as many of my friends married, bought houses, had kids, I was always aware that there was a growing gap between them and me. Yet it wasn’t until my first kid was born that I realized that what I had seen as a bit of lifestyle gap was really a yawning existential chasm.
Most of the clichés about parenting are true. It’s infinitely exhausting but infinitely rewarding — “all joy and no fun,” as the saying goes. My kids teach me something new every day. Hanging out with them makes me feel young again. They say the darndest things.
But becoming a parent has also damaged me in ways I would never have guessed. I’ve become less blithely confident and optimistic. I’ve become fearful of threats I used to laugh off or sneer at. My risk-versus-reward profiles are completely out of whack. The building blocks of my adventurous youth — sports, movies, booze, music — have been replaced by growing anxieties about antibiotic resistant bacteria, social media bullies and killer opioids. And now, concerts. The day after a young British man named Salman Abedi blew himself up at the end of a show by Ariana Grande, killing 22 people, including 10 teenagers, I couldn’t process it. Why that target? Why those people?
My contribution to the discussion amounted to the following pathetic tweet: “Hold your daughters tight guys, and kiss them relentlessly. That’s all I got.”
That can’t be all I got, because that’s not nearly good enough. None of this is — not the sentimentality, the weepiness, the fear.
For starters, it is intellectually inept. I know that by almost any measure, Canada is about as safe and secure and comfortable as it has ever been, and to go on as if it were otherwise is an offence to reason.
Second of all, it’s unseemly, plain and simple. If we in the West are starting to experience the pain and grief of the occasional attack on innocents, then we have a taste of what it is like to be a parent day in and day out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria and Sudan, not to mention Israel or Gaza.
But more than anything, it is an abdication of responsibility. Because when it comes down to it, I have pretty much one job as a parent, and that is to prepare my kids for life without me. I need to teach them to be free and independent persons, to come to their own conclusions about right and wrong, about what is worth doing in this world, and which risks are worth taking.
That’s a challenge that is hard enough when you start seeing threats around every corner. It’s doubly hard when you’re a father like me who has discovered that his parenting instincts about girls are remarkably old-fashioned and protective.
I can’t be sentimental and fearful about the world because my daughter needs more than that from me. She needs to know that if the world seems dark, then she can be a light. That if people are afraid, then she can be courageous. That if someone is alone, then she can be a friend.
And maybe it starts with a father who holds her tight and kisses her relentlessly. But maybe it also involves whispering in her ear, over and over until it becomes part of who she is: You’ve got this, my love. You can do it. Go and get it. All of this is yours.
Until then, I’ve got work to do.
(My daughter) needs to know that if the world seems dark, then she can be a light.