Theodicy, empathy, and a 5-year-old

We drove to school. When we arrived, my five-year-old daughter asked, ‘Where’s my backpack?’

‘Don’t you have it?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I left it on the footpath for you to put in the car.’

‘But you didn’t tell me,’ I said, ‘and I didn’t see it. Wasn’t I in the driver’s seat already?’

Her face began to crumple. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘let’s go in to class. And then I’ll drive home and get the backpack and bring it to school.’

Inside I fumed. I was meeting someone at 9.30; and I had better things to do than drive back and forth between home and school. But I gave her a hug, explained what had happened to her teacher, grumbled to another parent, and headed home.

No backpack.

I checked the house. No backpack, and I remembered having seen her carry it out of the house that morning. I checked the car again, and the veranda, and the front garden, and asked the neighbours. Still no backpack. So I made a second lunch, filled up a spare water bottle, found another dollar for the canteen, put it all in an old bag, and dropped it at school. Then I went to my meeting, half an hour late.

Later that day I searched again, to no avail. If it had been stolen, I thought it would probably have been emptied out and dumped near the railway line. So I walked to the dodgiest spot and there on the ground among the broken glass lay two forlorn loom bands. They were from a pack that she had wanted to share with friends at school. I checked a dozen or so dumpsters, hoping to find the bag itself, before I gave up.

What sort of person would steal a little kid’s backpack? It had the name of our primary school emblazoned on it; there was no way it belonged to a teenager, let alone an adult. And as I began the inventory of what had been lost, I felt more and more bewildered. What had they gained? A scuffed school backpack, useful for one school only. A dented water bottle. A grubby lunch sack. A gluten free soy free lunch: corn cakes with cheese, and a mandarin. A prep reader. A school library book. A bike lock. A little girl’s raincoat. Her favourite, irreplaceable, cardigan. And a dollar for the canteen.

It would cost us well over a hundred dollars to replace everything. And for that, someone gained a single dollar.

My bemusement turned to fury before dwindling into sadness. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be so desperate, and have so little empathy, that I’d steal what was clearly a young child’s bag. The thief had big issues to deal with. We, on the other hand, could easily replace what had been taken, and even find a new favourite cardigan. The only thing that mattered was how we handled it with our kids.

That afternoon, when they were home from school, I explained to my daughter that someone had stolen her backpack. We’d have to replace it, and everything that had been inside.

She had a cry, and a big cuddle. ‘Meanie bum,’ she said. I agreed, and said that it was right that she was angry. Nobody should take anyone’s stuff.

She was quiet for a few minutes. Then she asked, ‘Why are bad people made?’

And so I told her how I understand theodicy. All of us are sometimes good and sometimes bad, I said. Every time we make a choice for good, we strengthen that part of us. Every time we make a choice to be mean, or dishonest, or violent, we strengthen that part of us. The person who stole her bag would have made lots of choices for bad, and so that part of them was very strong; they probably just took her bag without even thinking. It wasn’t personal, I said. It wasn’t about her. And we don’t know why they made those choices; maybe things had happened in their lives that made it hard for them to choose good. I told her we could be angry at what they did, but we didn’t have to hate the person who did it. In a few days or weeks, we might even feel a bit sorry for them.

She thought for a while. Then she said, ‘Maybe they took it because they miss their mummy. Or maybe because my bag reminded them how happy they had been at primary school. But they’re still a meanie bum.’

‘They sure are,’ I said, and gave her an extra squeeze and a kiss on the top of her beloved head.

The next morning, as they were getting dressed, one of her sisters pulled out a hoodie that was getting a bit small. She turned to her younger sister and asked if she would like to have it. My five-year-old beamed and pulled it on, and it immediately became the new favourite. We bought a new backpack, lunch sack, bag tag, and everything else, and life has moved on.

***

Well, almost. I had left my daughter’s loom bands where they lay among the broken glass; they are slowly fading. Now I walk past them several times a week, and whenever I see them, I think about the person who stole the bag. I wonder if they miss their mummy; I wonder if they were ever happy at primary school. I give thanks for my youngest daughter’s empathic nature, so ready to think about why someone would be mean. I give thanks for my middle daughter’s thoughtful and spontaneous handing over of a hoodie when her sister needed to wear a hug. And I pray that one day the thief will experience such empathy and generosity, and be able to recognise it as gift.

Response: Life Drawing: a novel

It is rare that one reads a soliloquy on a long term of relationship, but Life Drawing is just that. Gus (short for Augusta) and Owen have been together for a quarter of a century, and their relationship is coloured by grief, a betrayal, and their inability to have children.

The novel begins with the fact of Owen’s death, then goes back in time to tell the story which lead up to it. A new neighbour has moved in, disrupting their rural solitude, and the resulting relationships have deep ramifications. This structure gives the book the shape of a thriller, if a rather beautiful and sedate one. (And I predicted the ending less than halfway through: not very thrilling, perhaps.)

However, the plot is not the point of this book. What makes it special is the portrait of a long marriage, seen through the eyes of Gus. Intimacy and solitude are woven together; the partners negotiate with and allow for each other in a careful, thoughtful dance. Gus observes her husband and herself with an acute eye, moving between love and anger, guilt and frustration, affection and jealousy. At times she has the eye of a lover, at other times, a maternal eye. Their sex life ebbs and flows, from non-existent to raunchy; from passionate connection to ‘the sex that’s like the decent enough music you listen to because the drive is so long and it’s the only radio station you can pick up’. Like every marriage, they navigate difficult emotional terrain; they interpret each other’s behaviour; they talk and keep quiet; they makes mistakes and choose kindness; they eat lunch.

As well as the marriage, Gus’s relationships with their new neighbour, Alison; a former student, Laine; and her father and sister are charted with intelligence and restraint. So too are the long-term effects of betrayal, guilt and grief. These depictions felt very true: closely observed, honest, and wise, and it is for this that I recommend the book.

My only wish was that it had ended differently. The denouement felt unnecessary, pandering to the more sensational expectations of a television audience rather than hewing to the quiet wisdom of the rest of the book. It detracted from what was otherwise a very thoughtful meditation. I’d have loved to have read this book one page short of chapter 21, and had the preceding story shaped accordingly. However, in the final chapter, Gus posits different ways the story might have continued. This reader, then, suggests reading this otherwise moving novel, but deciding on one’s own, preferred, outcome. I’d go with the last paragraph of the novel, perhaps.

Winners and losers in kids' sport

My daughters are losers. They play for a soccer club which focusses on teamwork, fair play, cheerful attitude and making up really cool chants – and neither of them has yet won a game.

Recently one of my daughters played against a side that was surprisingly tall. My daughter’s team kept things to a nil-all draw for the first half, but in the second half, they ran out of steam.

Losing didn’t seem to bother the team too much. Instead, they congratulated each other on keeping this bigger team to a draw for the first half. But the parents and coach looked at the other team, and sighed.

Quietly, the adults applied to the football federation for an assessment of the other team. The federation found that the other team contained a number of older girls, and so that team was re-graded. When the decision was made, our club notified us calmly, with a hint of an eye-roll and a smile. No railing at the other team, no suggestion that things were unfair, just a note that this was so and which way the ruling went.

I wondered to my husband whether the other team had made a mistake. He looked at me disbelievingly. Then he told me that when he was 11, he had been in a team which regularly played against teams stacked with older kids. Even in his own team, there was some suggestion that kids might lie about their age so they could play down a grade and win more. And, like my daughters’ teams, his team too always lost.

But imagine what sort of parents they have, he said, and what sort of adults those kids will grow up to be: taking advantage at every step, lying on their taxes, cheating on their partners, all driven by their pathetic egos.

I thought about the girls on the other team, and their coaches and parents, and felt sad. What sort of world do we live in, that the outcome of a child’s game matters so much to adults? Why is winning so important to parents that they ask the kids to lie? And what sort of hollow victory is that?

Surely it is much more important for kids to learn fair play, and teamwork, and how to keep your chin up when the odds are stacked against you? Surely they need to learn how to deal with frustration and disappointment? Because if they do it well, they will also learn to be steadfast, resilient and honest, qualities that will stand them in good stead as human beings.

And as for losing all the time, well, if either of my daughters’ teams ever win, you’ll hear the victory dance from here to Timbuktu. It won’t be some empty victory which leaves a bitter taste in their mouths. Instead, it will be something really worth celebrating.

Neither of my daughters has won a game yet, and because of the vagaries of the fixture, my older daughter’s team had to play the surprisingly tall team a second time before the re-grading took effect. My daughter’s team put on a good show, but of course they were beaten. Even so, I reckon I know which team was losing out.

The gift of not striving

It’s my birthday, and has it been a busy year! My third child is finally at school. I am working part time and studying part time and running a household and doing all the things that people my age do. But today, being my birthday, it is time to take stock and reflect.

Yesterday, I met with my professional supervisor. ‘What are you going to give yourself for your birthday?’ she asked. ‘Think about a gift you can give, from deep in yourself to yourself, and tell me about it next time.’

This morning I woke up and knew what it would be: permission to stop striving. There’s nothing wrong with working hard, but there’s sometimes wrong with endless striving. I get up in the morning, organise three kids out the door and ride them to school. Then I turn around and ride home. I work and study for five or six hours, stopping only to eat and pee, then hop back on the bike and pick the kids up from school. We cycle home, I feed them, then I bring the washing in, tidy the back table, organise piano practice, listen to readers, cook dinner, and do all the things every parent does every night of the week. My partner comes home and asks me how my day was, and I say, ‘I feel like I haven’t done anything.’ He asks me what I have actually done, and I say things like, ‘Well, I did a first draft of a book review for a journal, and wrote up the minutes of a meeting and made a heap of phone calls and met with my supervisor and sorted three loads of washing and cooked dinner and actually, there was a bit there after all, wasn’t there?’. He looks at me and smiles, yes.

Because I work in a church, I always work on Sunday evenings; and because I’m often preaching, I’ll write for a few hours many Saturdays, too. Because the kids are at school all week, I feel like I can’t ‘waste’ that time, and so I also work Monday to Friday. Because Easter is a big work week, with services on Thursday, Friday and Saturday night and a gathering on Sunday morning, and because my husband had to work over the school holidays, I didn’t get a break these Easter holidays from either my work or the kids. And so in fact I have worked for some hours at least of very many days in a row; and also been busy with children.

All things considered, I’m hardly twiddling my thumbs. Yet despite this activity, I often feel like I’m not doing enough. There are so many ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ that I find it hard to do the things that aren’t at the top of the list – like write a blog post, for example.

But today is my birthday, and I have given myself permission to stop striving. So I took the kids to school and went to the canteen. I usually work there for an hour on Tuesdays, but today, because I was not striving, I stayed longer. I sat on the deck with other parents and chatted over coffee about trees and gardens. Then I headed into the kitchen, where I made spinach and cheese pastries, and learned how to roll pastry like an empanada. I talked with my friend who runs the canteen: about parenting and housework, meditation and the meaning of life. She gave me a new cookbook, written by a friend of hers. In a quiet moment, we flicked through it and I was so inspired that I went home via the shops to buy the ingredients for a warming soup.

Because I wasn’t striving, I called a friend and had a birthday chat. Then, feeling decadent, I ate my birthday chocolate as an entrée to my vegetable lunch. I thought of ten jobs I should do, but I stood at the window and gazed at the pear tree, instead. The tree is turning from green to red, and the top is crowned in blazing leaves. I remembered a post I wrote years ago, about another pear tree, and dug it out and read it. And then, because I wasn’t striving, I decided to write this.

Happy birthday.

And to all you gardeners out there, yes, the photograph is of a crab apple leaf; the red leaves on the pear tree are too high for a good photo just yet! And this book is my most excellent birthday present - thanks Kris!

A lump, and quiet wisdom in the night

Not long ago, I found a lump. Not only that, but my breasts were sore and ached as if deeply bruised. To women of my age, that means only one thing: panic! For a week I shuttled between medical services. My doctor felt the lump and raised her eyebrows. She sent me off to the hospital. I stripped down in a tiny cubicle and put on a freezing, open-backed gown. I was shown into a dark room where a brisk woman ground an ultrasound wand into my aching breasts. She decided I needed a mammogram, and so I moved to another dim room where a different brisk woman pulled and kneaded my tender breasts into place, lowered the great weight of the machine until they were nearly flat, and took some shots. When it was over, I dressed and wandered out through a crowded waiting room, feeling sick.

The next day, the hospital called me. The pictures didn’t give them enough information; I had to go back. Again, I waited in a crowded room, stripped off in a tiny cubicle, and had my breasts kneaded into place. Again, the machine squeezed them into pancakes and took shots. Again I dressed, and left feeling sick.

And all the while, I panicked. Calm on the outside, I went through the motions; but inside, I was in turmoil. I couldn’t sleep. Instead I lay in bed each night beside my husband, kneading my breasts, feeling the soreness, getting the full measure of the lump, and thinking about death. Not yet forty, the mother of three primary school aged kids: I was not prepared to die.

About three o’clock one morning, something shifted. I realised that life was good. I didn’t want to be married to anyone else; I enjoyed being a mother; I loved where we live; I loved my work; and I had recently understood my life’s trajectory, a big deep satisfying revelation which filled me with a sense of home. And I realised that there was little more one could expect from life than to come to understand oneself, to be happy with one’s situation, and to be flooded with gratitude for all that has been. Even if this life was coming to an end, it had already been so much more than enough; I had already experienced abundance.

A couple of days later, I discovered that the lump was not malignant; it was just a lump; and the sensation of bruising was just the latest symptom of the candida that has raged through my system for years.

If the results had been different, I don’t know whether I would have been able to hold onto that early-morning moment. The quiet wisdom of the small hours is hard to remember in the full light of day; in the face of work and study and children; in the reality of sickness; in the waking awareness of all the things a person my age is still expected to do and be.

But I want to record it here, to remember that at one time I knew deep in my bones that already my life has been more than enough; already, it overflows with goodness and mercy; already, my life is abundant.

Response: Kith: The riddle of the childscape

When was the last time you encountered the word ‘tatterdemalion’? I have just read one of the most playful, exuberant, relishing encounters with language that I have ever come across: Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, by Jay Griffiths. The author loves language and odd words; she plays with meanings and roots and etymologies; she relishes alliteration and other musical tricks; and the cadence of her writing is positively lyrical. Or, as she writes (in relation to the metaphors we have for feeling and knowing, but which equally pertains to her modes of expression), ‘Language…, a beautiful partisan, waits with rifle and song to ambush us into remembering what we used to know as children.’

Yes, the writing is beautiful, drawing the reader in; but the point of the book is not language. Instead, in the course of writing her last book, Wild, Griffiths visited many indigenous tribes and found herself wondering why the indigenous kids she observed were so cheerfully grounded, while the Western kids she knew were so unhappy by comparison. Kith is her attempt to answer that question.

Her answer is long, opinionated, and unabashedly Romantic. In brief, she argues that kids in the West rarely get what they really need: secure early attachment followed by extreme freedom; a relationship with the woods and the wild, including wildlife; a big tribe of kids and adults; stories packed with metaphor which allow for the expression of a child’s emerging sense of self; lots of free time; rites of passage into adulthood; freedom from consumerism; a rich, responsive education; and so on.

Instead, what they get is ‘controlled’ crying and the physical isolation of cots, prams and car seats, followed by helicopter parenting and little nuclear families; constant surveillance; highly structured schedules; media outlets and politicians which portray them in a constantly negative light; stop and search laws, curfews and dispersal orders for the crime of being young; lives trapped indoors; hollow stories; no rites of passage; and industrial-style, heavily politicised education.

None of these observations are particularly original. In recent years, Skenazy encouraged parents to let their kids be more independent; Louv urged kids into the great outdoors; Hodgkinson called for tribes and freedom and faerie stories; Robinson advocated for an education which drew out the unique gifts of each child; and many, many writers begged us chilly Westerners to be more physically affectionate with our babies and toddlers. It’s obvious stuff.

What sets Griffiths’ book apart is the way she brings these themes together under the umbrella of Romanticism. She compares the childhood experiences of Romantic poets – Wordsworth, Blake, Clare, Whitman – with indigenous practices of childcare, arguing that they have much in common; and goes on to suggest that these approaches will lead to happier children. Further, she argues, we lack (but need) a Western philosophical framework to describe our parenting practices; Romanticism fits the bill.

I love her writing; I agree with many of her observations regarding how kids could be better raised; and I find many of her arguments regarding Romantic and indigenous ways of raising children reasonable. However, this book is so passionately one-eyed, and so flawed, that Griffiths fails to convince overall – and this is a pity.

To begin with, despite identifying what Western kids lack – such as secure attachment, a big tribe, and rites of passage – Griffiths offers few practical suggestions as how to get these things into kids’ lives. How do we make parenting easier so that parents have the emotional capacity to forge deep strong attachments to their children? How do we balance the needs of parents with the needs of children? How do we widen people’s perceptions of their role in the lives of other people’s kids, so that parents aren’t required to fulfil all the adult roles in a child’s life? In a post-church society, who develops and conducts rites of passage? And so on. These questions are all raised by the text; yet Griffiths offers no solutions, and it is simply not helpful to identify what is needed (and indeed to criticise harshly how we parents, of which Griffiths does not appear to be one, do it wrong), but to offer no suggestions for change. It is left to the reader to imagine what could be and then put it into place – and yet many of the necessary structures are almost impossible to tackle family by family: they require cultural change.

For example, to take the example of a tribe, it took nine years of talking and parenting before we found a family who was genuinely interested in and able to live in the same street as us, and, more than that, willing to get involved in our kids’ lives in ways that eased the pressure on our child-parent relationship. Griffiths writes rather breathlessly that, in one tribe, parents never discipline their own children; that is left to others so that the affection of the parent-child relationship is never damaged. That sounds bloody wonderful, but it would require a seismic shift in how we as a society take responsibility for other people’s children for it to be even remotely possible here.

Another weakness of the book is how Griffiths glosses over the hardships of life for indigenous children. Sure, traditional ways of childhood sound great for those who survive, especially boys: roaming, hunting, fishing, and untold freedom for kids. But traditional ways also involve high infant mortality, infanticide when the rains don’t come or too many girls have been born, the ‘betrayal’ (as it’s described in the book by a young victim) of female genital mutilation, the sexual trade of young girls to forge connections or strengthen associations between tribes, social controls which require high levels of conformity, even child sacrifice for religious purposes. In over 350 pages of praising indigenous childcare practices and criticising ours, Giffiths devotes a scant couple of pages to listing some of the downsides of being an indigenous kid, and offers no explanation or justification for these less than happy practices. This is deeply unsatisfactory, and feels unfair. At least kids in the West get to live when the rains don’t come; most Western girls don’t have their genitals hacked off with rusty razor blades; and the sexual trade in young girls is looked upon as an aberration and a crime. For these aspects of the Western approach to childhood, I am grateful.

Because I have never lived with an indigenous tribe, I find it hard to judge the veracity of Griffiths’ account of indigenous lives. Even so, I found myself questioning it. For example, in one place Griffiths writes that after spending an afternoon with over a hundred indigenous kids, she realised that she hadn’t once heard a kid cry, and that she couldn’t imagine the same situation with Western kids. Having just spent three weeks of the school holidays with two different tribes of kids, aged between 6 months and 15 years, I can vouch that even Western kids rarely cry when they’re running around in a pack. They get busy, and work things out; and so I’m not convinced that this lack of crying is a unique feature of indigenous life.

To the contrary, in fact. One of my friends lived for two years in an indigenous village in Papua New Guinea. When she returned, she told me that one thing she will always remember is the crying. It formed the constant soundscape; she said she could not remember a time when she couldn’t hear a child crying, and that coming back to Australia was a great relief from this point of view. Was this village, eight hours’ travel by small boat from Rabaul, ‘less indigenous’ than the people visited by Griffiths? Or, in her visits with indigenous people, did Griffiths excise weeping children from her experience and hear only what she wanted to hear? I have no way of knowing, but I am sceptical that the lives of indigenous children following traditional ways of life are always so blissful. (As for the lives of indigenous kids whose traditional ways of life are being torn to shreds, that is, most of them, I weep.)

This blanket enthusiasm for indigenous practices coupled with a blanket criticism of Western practices grates; and it also leads to ridiculous inconsistencies. Griffiths is scathing of the way Western children are penned up indoors, locked away from the wild spaces that they need for their development. Yet in a chapter devoted to the importance of imagination and metaphor, Griffiths writes positively about the Kogi people in Colombia, who identify a boy as a future spiritual leader. This infant is taken from his mother, and shut in a dim cave for the first nine years of his life; his only exposure to the wider world is through the stories told to him. After nine years, he emerges as a spiritual leader (or, I suspect, completely mad). Of this practice, Griffiths admits only that some Westerners may feel ‘ambivalence’. Horror is more like it. One is left with the impression that it’s not okay for Western kids to be inside playing the piano, learning to cook, reading faerie stories, building cubbies, or playing hide-and-seek; but an indigenous kid can be locked away in a dark cave for nine years. Oh, please! Clearly, this is absurd; yet Griffiths seems cheerfully oblivious to both the brutality of some indigenous practices and the inconsistencies within her text which lead her to condemn in the West that which she extols in other cultures.

Griffiths also suffers from the hopeless sentimentality towards children that one sees in non-parents from time to time. As a parent, I do find it helpful to be reminded to let my kids take risks, to get them outside, to let them have their privacy and secret spaces and special dens. I like being a little breathless about the idea of childhood, and I know that when we relax our family culture, everyone is happier and more cheerful. But I also know just how much of childhood is about shit and sex and fighting and greed and fear, not only in my own children or the children I spend time with, but in my memories of childhood; and it seems that there is little room in Griffiths’ worldview for such normal kids. Not all kids are large-spirited hearty adventurers or passionate artists. Griffiths seems to be unaware of the variations in personality which are found, I suspect, across all cultural styles.

Her one-eyed view also means that Griffiths fails to see the opportunities for wildness and secret places that city children find: on the subway, up the fire stairs, under the stoop, in a cubby, or in the branches of a tree at the local park. Not every wild space or secret den needs to be a rural idyll. She seems to miss the ways city kids lose and construct themselves, and make little nets of privacy, not just in folk tales but in music and dance and sport, and dreaming in the back seat of the car. Her unabashed primitivism lacks subtlety; and there is so much good about being a Western kid that I find it hard to perceive the crisis of childhood to which she constantly alludes.

So I have lots of issues with the book; still, I recommend it. Griffiths’ observations about what makes kids thrive are good sense, overall; and the great exuberant eloquence of her writing is such a delight, such a gift, that I am prepared to forgive very many of the flaws. Cat-shadows in beetroot patches will win me over, every time.

‘Obedience is deadly, will is divine and the vital wildness of the human spirit is purring, over there, like a cat-shadow in the beetroot patch.’

***

PS: If you’re not really up for a long, loquacious, one-eyed, deeply flawed rant – though why not, I can’t imagine! – but you still want to think about how to parent generously, I’d recommend Hodgkinson’s utilitarian The Idle Parent. My longer response to it is here, but, in short, it advocates freedom and choice; is packed with suggestions for ways to maximise love and affection and minimise the rage and frustration of parenting; and urges parents to seek ways of making family life fun. It’s intelligent, enjoyable, good-humoured and opinionated, and lacks only cat-shadows and beetroot patches. And who has a beetroot patch, anyway?

Farewell to school reading

For nearly five years, I have spent a couple of hours each week reading with kids at a local primary school. Most of the kids at that school are from a refugee background; many of their parents had very little schooling themselves; and books and reading are rarely part of their home life. Many of the kids come from large families, and so even those parents who might be able to provide reading support in the classroom tend to be at home caring for younger children.

Yet children need assistance to learn to read, preferably one on one. A teacher in a classroom doesn’t have time to read with every student every day; this is where volunteers come into play. Most middle class schools have a host of parents who volunteer in the classroom. At this school, because of the family situations of the students, other adults step in.

We volunteers can’t provide the daily reading with each child that is recommended; and yet even our few hours are something. What, I’m not always sure. There are many weeks when the reading is the point – I see a kid make a leap in fluency, or really understand a concept. Other weeks, the relationship is the point, and I was given the bangle in the photograph to prove it! Still other weeks, the point might be nothing more than to show through our actions to a group of kids that not all Australians are hostile to refugees.

They are all good reasons to be there, and yet I feel like it’s time to wind up my involvement. Stop reading with these fantastic kids, stop traipsing down once a week for even that little while, and start doing something else with my time. The problem is, having once committed, I struggle to step away – especially since I have no pressing reason not to.

Moreover, I am aware that I am the powerful one in these relationships. I can choose to be involved, or to move on; whatever I do, people will still be grateful for the paltry efforts I have put in. Meanwhile, the kids turn up to school week after week without the educational consolidation that many other kids’ home lives provide; they have no choice in the matter. For several months now I have grappled with these entwined feelings – that I have had enough, and that I feel guilty about stopping – as I try to decide what I will commit to this year.

One morning late last year, as I was preparing to head down, I received a text from the school reminding me that it was mini-Eid. This meant that almost no kids were at school, and so there was no point in me going. I unexpectedly had the morning off. So I dropped my daughter at kinder, then basked in the freedom. I didn’t do anything amazing: I hung out the washing, wrote a blog post, checked my emails, read a chapter of a book, and picked up my daughter again. And it was fantastic – an unexpected gift, a few hours to centre down in what had been a busy week.

More, I felt deeply relieved. I was glad to be home, glad not to be negotiating books and behaviour, glad not to answer the same questions that I am asked every week. ‘Can I call you Alice?’ (No, my name is Alison); ‘Where’s your little daughter?’ (at kinder, you know that!); ‘How will she go on your bike?’ (on the trailer, which is parked at kinder); ‘Why you cut your hair short like a boy’s? Tsk, so ugly!’ (I like it that way); and so on.

The deep relief I experienced when I stayed home is a clue, I think, that my involvement in the school should come to an end. My low grade annoyance at the weekly questions is another. If I am tired by these kids and this situation, I am not giving them my best; there are many days when I struggle not to get cranky.

It’s not that there isn’t a pressing need; it’s just that, for whatever reason, I am no longer the one to meet it. In this world, there are billions of pressing needs, and billions of people to meet them. I am not indispensable. I have to trust that, if I let this go, someone else will step into my shoes – with any luck, someone more gentle, more humorous, and better with kids. And I have to trust that, if I let this go, something else will arise to which I can offer my time, and my self.