Be grateful and stop moaning – or, why we need to talk about home-schooling

You know the professor whose kids gatecrashed his BBC interview, causing him to panic repeatedly, resulting in the whole thing going viral? Well there’s a spin-off version that shows what would’ve happened if the professor were a woman and a mother. You guessed it: she’s grand. She comforts, feeds and entertains her young children without for a second letting her focus slip or losing her train of thought - because mammies are brilliant at multi-tasking. Hilarious, eh? Dads are clueless and mothers are superheroes. Except I don’t find it hilarious; I find it infuriating.

I guess it’s hit a nerve during lockdown more than it would’ve before. The reality of video calls featuring home-schooling intervals, meltdown backdrops, accidental coffee spillage and the repeated need for cuddles and snacks is just that bit closer to home right now. But as thousands of households all over the country are grappling with this new normal, the narrative of maternal super powers isn’t helping. Let me tell you, I feel nothing like a superhero. I feel exhausted and sad and insufficient a lot of the time.

Last week, journalist Jennifer O’Connell wrote a piece arguing for staggered school openings before the summer holidays. (We could laugh at the notion of any such thing as ‘summer holidays’ at all at a time of social distancing and months-long school closures, but that’s for another post.) On Twitter and elsewhere, words like ‘eugenics’ and ‘mass murder’ were thrown around, because naturally, unless you’re willing to live under strict lockdown for a few years, until this thing has fully gone away or we’ve found a sustainable vaccination solution, that’s clearly what you’re advocating for. 

Having been mostly off Twitter for a long time until recently, I made the mistake of adding to the stream of voices suggesting that it’s not all that black and white and maybe she’s not in fact a psychopath, whereby a kind troll quickly checked my bio to make the connection with my Swedish roots, concluding that it’s unsurprising that I’m up for Nazi-style extinction strategies like those in place in my heartless home country. Most interesting, though, was the growing, confident choir of those pointing out that parents these days don’t think before they procreate, and they just want the schools to open because they hate spending time with their children. Case closed.

I committed a social media faux pas and deleted my tweets, not because I changed my mind but because trolls are annoying at the best of times, and during life under lockdown they can make a woman lose her shit. But no matter what strategy you believe in, the reality of home-schooling while working full-time is an impossible equation. You have to work until midnight and manage on extremely limited sleep, broken by strange nightmares and anxious children, and keep answering 2,987 questions an hour as your children figure out what the coronavirus is and whether famous people are always good at things and whether bumble bees like dog poo. You have to show which way to start to write a lower-case d and help pare pencils while you’re in the middle of creating yet another spreadsheet, and then you have to make snacks, endless snacks, after which you have to try to write while the Body Brothers are singing in the background. Then you have to try for the fourteenth time to add a new entry to a task on a buggy school app that needs refreshing every few minutes, while your children’s attention spans wither away and you accept, reluctantly but realistically, that you’re not going to get through anywhere near half the school work this week either. And when your kids can’t sleep at night because everything’s strange and they are human too, you have to be patient and try not to think about the emails you have to deal with before you call it a day, because children can sense anything, everything, and if you’re stressed and thinking about work they simply won’t go to sleep, ever.

Then, you have to cheer for childcare workers on the back of the government announcement of the new wage subsidy top-up scheme, because you agree that their job is one of the most important jobs in the world; and then you have to do the childcare, with no pay and in no time at all, while acknowledging and feeling urgently grateful for your own privilege, which is genuinely very real indeed. And the memes in your feed that said ‘Reach out – don’t suffer in silence!’ for World Mental Health Day only six months ago have been replaced by ‘Safe at home, not stuck at home’ and endless gratitude practices, because actually, unless you’re in intensive care or your parent is dying or you’re about to lose your home, soldiering on and suffering in silence would be preferable, thank you very much.

We’re at the end of week seven, and in our family, we’ve sort of found a groove, not because we’ve figured it out and are past the shock, but much thanks to the fact that one of my biggest clients from the past few years has gone out of business. Like most parents, I love being with my kids when I’m not actually meant to be doing something else and don’t have to prove to someone at a laptop with a shaky internet connection many miles away that I’m indeed still working and not in fact taking the piss just because a kid is having a concert in the background and another is on the toilet shouting for help to reach the loo roll. I really enjoy chatting to them about the SPHE curriculum strand of citizenship, and I love perfecting my goalie skills as I pretend to be Lindahl, the Swedish women’s national football squad’s goalkeeper, in an attempt to give them a tiny but important piece of Sweden as our Easter trip is cancelled. But that’s the thing: in this perfectly impossible mess, I’ve lost a huge chunk of work – and I’m the lucky one. 

My children are lucky, too, even though we’re never going to get through all the school work. There’s no getting away from the fact that the government doesn’t have a plan for the kids who are safer in school than at home, nor for those who were lagging behind before all this started and whose parents are simply unable to even begin to decipher the templates and curriculum notes teachers send them. Moreover, our elected representatives (I’m genuinely too tired to take the debate about the dubiousness of the word ‘elected’ in that context since the General Election we can all only just remember even though it was less than three months ago) also appear to be relying on some form of parenting wizardry, gifted, as if by an invisible hand, to parents the moment their children are born. Enter multi-tasking superhero mammy! She doesn’t need money or time to be everything a child needs at all times, even when she’s working an intense eight hours a day. Handy. And here’s me thinking I’m lucky; maybe I’m just flawed and stupid and a terrible mother and if I was only good enough I would’ve been able to do it all, work and teach and play and care and feed, for six months straight without losing focus or burning out.

It’s not, of course, working parents who are the greatest victims of this crisis. From healthcare workers to single parents and those immuno-compromised and scared shitless that they might catch this thing, there are endless people bearing the brunt of both financial and anxiety-related fears right now in a way that many parents like myself can’t even imagine. But this soldiering on we’ve become so keen on, this insistence that you’re not allowed to complain as long as you can still breathe, where will that get us? How can we build a sustainable, if temporary, new normal if we insist that our gratitude must silence us? I don’t accept that this is the best we can do. I won’t accept that the government gets to bang on about the importance of the childcare sector that’s been in freefall for years, and then send the kids home for months on end with no plan and no support. I refuse to pretend that it’s good enough. 

I can pause my social life and survive without hugging my friends. I can cancel my trip to Sweden and miss out on seeing my parents, cancel my gym membership and stop going to the playground. It’s hard, but needs must. But children’s lives can’t be paused. Their development continues one way or another, and it needs guidance and hand-holding; their bodies need movement and fresh air, and their need for love, attention and closeness is constant. As Philippa Perry says, it’s impossible for children to understand being with someone in a physical space and them not being available. What will six months of normalising that do to a child? What will six months of being forced to do that to a child do to a parent? 

Here’s a funny one. Have you read the Irish Constitution? There’s a widely debated article in there about the work within the home “without which the common good cannot be achieved”. Talk about us all being in this together – we’re bringing the kids home, caring for them and teaching them at home, all for the common good. Article 41.2 states that “mothers should not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”. It may be sexist, but at least, for those of us lacking super powers, it’s there in black and white. Perhaps we’ll all leave our jobs and let Leo foot the bill. I’m not saying I’m in favour; I’m just saying this ain’t good enough. 

Starting the new decade right: on solidarity, ‘lagom’ and #GE2020

‘Thank you for your €4 donation to Women's Aid.’ I was sitting on the 11 bus going through town as the auto-response text message came through. There was an orange weather warning for strong winds, and the rain was coming down in sheets, sideways. Through the condensation on the bus windows, I could just about see the sleeping bags tucked away in the doorways in a desperate attempt to get shelter from the damp winter cold. ‘Like Charity,’ the text message encouraged, and I thought about the statistic that says that no other EU nation donates to charity more than Irish people do. 

As the 2010s are coming to an end, I worry about what that very statistic really means. ‘Irish people are so lovely!’ people exclaim after spending a few days here, and they’re right; Irish people are, generally and comparatively speaking, warm, exceptionally funny, and generous. But as we get closer to the next General Election, the Tory landslide over in the UK still reverberating in the air, I worry that the Irish are just too keen on giving out of their own pockets – at their own discretion and judgement – to ever give up on the low taxation and minimal financial redistribution that have caused the very problem their charity aims to fix. 

We’re leaving behind a decade characterised by natural disaster, war and frustratingly fruitless Brexit debates, a decade of Instagram influencers and British Royal wedding mania, of uprisings such as the Arab Spring and the #metoo movement. The 2010s were when the first iPad saw the light of day, when Lady Gaga walked down the red carpet in what quickly became a legendary meat dress, and when most of us developed a love-hate relationship with the absolute relentlessness of WhatsApp conversations. And, of course, it was the decade of the Nordic lifestyle trends.

I published my book, Lagom: The Swedish Art of Balanced Living, in 2017, attempting to unpack one of the many concepts that might begin to explain why the Nordic nations consistently rank as among the happiest, most trusting and well-balanced people in the world. I wrote about everything from generous parental leave and non-hierarchical company structures to a minimalist, functionalist design heritage and a penchant for making the most of leftovers. Journalists asked for endless listicles outlining the most ‘lagom’ ways to achieve a balanced life, and I obliged: I spoke about regular coffee breaks, time in nature, neighbourly friendliness – all reasonably bite-sized and manageable ways to simplify and connect, the ‘lagom’ way. 

No one seemed too interested in talking about financial redistribution and radically subsidised childcare, though – and why would they be? Journalists don’t write policy, after all, and there was no election on the horizon anyway. But there is now, and I can’t help but think of all those people who ask about Scandinavia when they hear where I’m from, wondering why on earth I choose to live here when I’m from what is practically utopia; I think about them and wonder if they’re going to vote for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael again. 

We’ve had a decade that started at the depths of a recession, continued with years of harsh austerity measures, and ended on a relative high with a semblance of hope after overwhelming majorities voted for marriage equality and a woman’s right to choose – so why is it that I don’t feel hopeful? People speak of winds of change, and yet, Ireland has never voted for any such thing in a General Election. For change from one socially conservative, fiscally liberal right-wing party to another, sure – like a tiring game of ping pong without a referee. And then some magazine reports about outstanding education in Finland, exceptionally family-friendly policies in Sweden and happier-than-ever children in Denmark, and people go, ‘How, just HOW do they do it?!’

I can’t stress this enough: it’s not because they light more candles per capita and drink more coffee than any other people in the world that Scandinavians are so happy – it’s because they’re safe and secure enough to even focus on that stuff. The secret to Nordic happiness is not really a secret: that these countries have been governed by left-leaning social democratic governments or coalitions almost uninterruptedly for a century – up until a couple of decades ago – is a well-known fact, and the policies people around the world appear jealous of are direct consequences of that. This is clearer than ever now that, in Sweden, a range of different, less left-leaning, more centrist and liberal coalitions have started to break the entire social security system down.

It’s hard to be happy when your landlord can do whatever he likes, when your private health insurance is a useless token and the hospitals have run out of trolleys in corridors to put sick people on. It’s hard to be happy when you can’t afford the childcare costs, but leaving your job means losing your home. And it’s really hard to be happy when you know that thousands of kids, thousands of fellow human beings, are homeless, and many more are stuck for years in substandard accommodation without proper kitchen and bathroom facilities. And hell yeah, I’m a fan of regular coffee breaks, but they’re not going to fix the mess that decades of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael rule have put us in.

This is what not voting for change looks like: I’m on a bus in what feels like the umpteenth storm this year, texting donations to a charity that helps survivors of domestic violence, looking out at doorways that are becoming campsites. Global warming, the safety of women and children, and the housing crisis are not the concerns nor the priorities of the people who run this country. If they were, we’d know by now. There’s no beating around the bush anymore: a vote for one of the two large establishment parties is a vote for homelessness, for a desperately crumbling health system, for complete inability to deal with the climate crisis in a meaningful, structural way, and for growing inequality between the rich and the poor. And if you ask me again about the secret to Nordic happiness, that’s the answer you’ll get.

‘So go back to your own country then, if it’s so great!’ I guess you know you’ve hit a nerve when the only retort is one infused with xenophobia. But I’m not saying that Sweden is perfect. What I’m saying is this: there’s a disconnect between the Irish generosity and the refusal to scrutinise old political habits, between a nation that wants to help those in need but that has never ever had a social security system worth its salt. The election is just one way to change that – just the tip of an iceberg, the beginning of a huge shift, and far from the solution to all our problems. But when I reflect on the decade that’s passed and think about the decade that’s to come, I yearn for that shift, for a little bit of self-scrutiny and heartfelt solidarity – for the compassion and community spirit that are the very heart of ‘lagom’: ‘alla ska med’. Everyone’s coming. No one left behind.

No woman is an island

“Happiness is within,” they say. Within you, within that cup of herbal tea and a gratitude journal and deep, deep breaths. You should try yoga. We’ll all have our 15 minutes of fame – if we just find that strength within. We’ll all be somebody, more than just selfless mothers – we’ll make our lives into works of art, copyrighted, patented, and with no one to thank but ourselves.

One for the gratitude journal: we’re safe from floods and earthquakes. But calm as the waters may be, the 8th ships us across the Irish Sea, sweeping secret upon secret under a rug woven of intricate age-old lies. “I’m drowning in post-natal depression,” says one, as another numbs guilt with a bottle of Tesco’s Finest. A third perfects the art of covering bruises with concealer and a new fringe, while 12 a day are exiled. Shame – our greatest export.

“Happiness is within,” so the self-help books say. But what is self-help if the self needs help, reaching out and away for respite, for togetherness? Sure happiness must be within when the outside and beyond is cold and lonely, bills unpaid and children hungry, wombs a battlefield and homes hollow as ghosts. You must find strength within to get up early in the morning, pay your taxes, look after your own, never complain – good man. When there’s no such thing as society and Thatcher rests in peace, take a deep breath, try yoga. Down by the Central Bank, placards of blood and flesh make religious icons of grotesque purity, flaunted by big, strong men who know nothing of hormonal battlefields but are certain that a heartbeat is a heartbeat because God tells us so. Four of them, maybe five, the placards huge like altarpieces. Just a couple of yards away is a woman, alone, red tape across her mouth and a small hand-written sign asking the big, strong men to mind their own battlefields. Then a stranger walks up, joins in silence, grabs her hand. Up by the Dáil, another man with a sign – on strike for that same heartbeat, demonstrating his right to refuse to eat so that others can be force-fed. Up walk 25 handmaids, all dressed in red, a long line of white bonnets. Solidarity in silence. Yes, there is such a thing as society. There’s a soup kitchen just around the corner, serving mugs full of steaming hot care and smiles, and three lads on Facebook offering free grass-cutting services and hugs to old, disabled, sick people and single parents. Hope in a social media post.

I don’t think happiness is within, but in between, in what holds us together – in showing up and grabbing someone’s hand. I think it is in marching side by side, 20-30-50-thousand, unapologetically through the streets that are our own, refusing to throw another woman under the bus and in the sea, turning the streets of Dublin from battlefields into a weft of compassion and solidarity. I think hope is in drinking that tea together, taking a deep, deep breath and listening to each other – disagreeing, maybe, but respectfully, without judgement. Marching, stronger together, until the ideas of ‘mind your own business’ and self-realisation for 15 minutes of fame no longer shape our policies and our dreams and our health; until we refuse to swallow our pride along with guilt and shame and tears, and admit that some days giving up feels easier than leaning in and reaching for what was once a seed of happiness within; until we can say out loud that today it hurts, and I need help. It’s not your fault.

This, to me, is self-care: surrounding myself with other people who care, mothers who haven’t slept in years but spend every free minute writing down facts and engaging in debates and finding pills for those who need them; women who have been abused and ignored, who are scared and hurting but won’t stop talking; and those born with all the luck and privilege in the world, who would give it all up in a flash if it meant those born without could be heard. No man is an island. No woman is an island. When I despair, I put my faith in community and I seek out these warriors. And then, together, we cry the world better.

Infighting on the left and a real left-wing alternative

Oh, the infighting on the left. If only they could get along and get their act together, and maybe they’d achieve something.

In the aftermath of #coponcomrades, and after a couple of years of complete lack of consensus around Corbyn’s Labour leadership in the UK, it is easy to feel like the infighting on the left has become a pet peeve of many, interestingly especially those who aren’t actually that far out on the left. And I’m starting to feel frustrated by it. Not the infighting, that is – but the opinions.

As things stand in Ireland, billionaire business man Denis O’Brien is the owner of Communicorp and significant minority shareholder of INM, the companies that control significant media outlets including the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent, the Herald, the Irish Daily Star, Newstalk and Today FM. News Corp, of which the Murdoch family controls 39% of the voting rights, owns the Irish Sun and the Irish edition of the Sunday Times. Our government, at the same time, is fighting the European commission’s call for Apple to repay billions in back taxes, while adding new tax breaks to make up for the phasing out of the double Irish tax structure – anything to please the big multinational players.

What I’m saying is this: Ireland is a fan of neoliberal fiscal policy, and its mainstream media isn’t going to be asking any questions.

But what’s that got to do with infighting? Quite a lot, if you ask me.

I had already left London when Jeremy Corbyn, somewhat controversially, took the helm of the UK Labour party, but the divisions were clear: there was no way he’d ever be a successful leader of a Labour party in a country with a first-past-the-post electoral system, centrist Labour voters said. The hard left was told to give in and accept a softer, more liberal leader. In Ireland, their peers are singing to a similar tune, as the left decries the lack of a viable left-of-centre alternative to end the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael ping-pong game. If only the infighting on the left would stop – then we could all hold hands, laughing all the way to the Dáil.

Except, of course, a conversation like that around #coponcomrades is never going to go mainstream enough to impact on the potential for a real left-wing alternative in Irish parliamentary politics. And sure enough, if we had a Corbyn equivalent, the O’Briens and the Murdochs would fry them long before they became party leader – just like the UK media tried to do.

My problem with the criticism of the infighting on the left is that it’s almost always populist; the idea is that we’ll never make a realistic enough alternative to Varadkar and his crew. We need to get it together and seem like we’re all on the same page; we need to agree on some not-too-leftist policies and bring them to the ballot box – and then we can iron out the details. It’s almost as if people thought that ‘the left’ was this homogenous anti-Varadkar gang, all subscribing to the same politics and the same worldview; as if anyone who doesn’t tick O’Brien’s boxes must be anti-market liberalism enough to be happy to throw just about any other principles under the bus for the chance of a bit of redistribution of wealth.

A republic with a single-transferable-vote system and a neoliberal mainstream media will never make a good breeding ground for new lefty alternatives. The voting system alone is designed to perpetuate status quo in order to favour stability, and a media that plays by the rules of the free market is bound to play into the hands of neoliberal values. Combined, they’re a Fine Gael dream and couldn’t care less about infighting on the left – though given the chance, I’m sure they’d use it if they had to.

If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution. Give me a left-wing alternative that throws working class women under the bus, and I’ll pass. If it’s not intersectional, it doesn’t matter how proud Robin Hood would be.

The left, in and of itself, is anti-establishment; it feeds on the criticism of the neoliberal status quo, not the waltzing with it. So you say we need to play by the rules of the market to get in the door, before we can change the rules of the game? Fine – who will we sacrifice along the way? How much can we play ball and still call ourselves a lefty alternative?

I know so many people who are burnt out right now, activists who are on a break, who care too deeply to stop – until they’re so broken they have no other choice. People give and give and give, because that’s how important this is.

When you say that we need to stop the infighting, you are inadvertently saying that the details don’t matter, that maybe some minorities can wait. Or, if that’s not your intention, you are blind to the power of the status quo and a media that funds the already rich and drinks pints with those already in power. A left-wing alternative was never going to walk in the front door all suited up, shaking hands with Varadkar. And if it wasn’t willing to take the difficult conversations, it was never a true alternative in the first place. 

Police brutality and punching down

I was standing in the airport security queue at Heathrow Airport when a group of middle-aged women started laughing, indiscreetly, at a trans woman just in front of me in the queue; and I wanted to say something, yet I didn’t want to cause a scene, didn’t want to make the experience any worse for the woman in front of me than it already was. Then we approached the security belt and staff started laughing and pointing, even less discreetly than the women had done, and I couldn’t contain the rage. I ended up telling them off; I ended up in tears, shaking. The woman informed me that she was fine – this was her everyday life, after all. She was used to it.

With hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t the security staff that broke me. With hindsight, I was definitely already sad, probably already broken. What broke me was the story of the woman who killed herself, the activist whose mental illness episode ended in police arrest as she wandered the streets of Dublin naked – an arrest that was videoed, shared, watched on Facebook by 130,000 people before, just a few days later, she took her own life.

More than upsetting, frightening and enraging, the behaviour of the gardaí proved a point, proved that she’d never been a real, valued person in their eyes, having grown up in an estate they didn’t touch but sneered at, a world they didn’t care for – one they protected the privileged classes from, despite exclusion being the heart of the problem in the first place. From being ignored to being abused, she was worthless to them. And people are offended when they hear people say that all cops are bastards. That’s what broke me.

All cops aren’t bastards, yet everything they touch turns to muck. Records of millions of imaginary breath tests; false allegations of sexual abuse, leaked personal information, lives ruined. Once entangled in a system of corrupt power relationships, even the most well-intended citizen will struggle to tell right from wrong. But what breaks me is that those who know that indeed all cops aren’t bad are so busy defending them that they refuse to see the abuse by those who are, refuse to see how one thing leads to another, how police brutality is killing working class people, literally.

All cops aren’t bastards – just like #notallmen, indeed #notallmedia. But try to tell the same people that not all travellers trash hotels, that not all muslims are terrorists, and they’ll insist that it’s hard to see the wood for the trees, that when you see it happening more than once it’s hard not to come to expect it. The good and righteous should take responsibility for their tribe, they say. But who takes responsibility for the gardaí when they share footage of a distressed woman at her most vulnerable?

‘I don’t get it,’ some say about transsexuality, as if their ability to empathise and identify with others writes the rules, as if ‘not getting it’ equals forgetting everything they’ve ever known about human decency and thinking it’s OK to point and laugh at a person who is never allowed to feel normal. There are a lot of things to feel sad about in the world right now, but perhaps that’s what’s worst of all: the fact that so many so often will fail to stand up for other people who don’t already have the upper hand, fail to empathise with anyone but those already in power. That so often, people are willing to tar everyone with the same brush as long as they’re already oppressed and powerless, to play along with Varadkar’s game of ratting on those most desperate in society, those already left out. That #notallanything only ever punches down, never up; that it only ever serves to silence.

And that’s what breaks me – that I’m only really feeling this now, protected my entire life by the privilege of boredom. That I’m crying in an airport while the security staff roll their eyes at me and keep on laughing, and the trans woman soldiers on – because this is the world she’s used to.

Real change or spare change? Or, why adopting the language of the establishment won't fix it

“See how your income would change with the Renua Ireland flat-tax tax calculator,” my local Renua candidate tweeted today. That’s how Renua is planning on winning votes – literally: click a button and see how many quid you’ll save.

I went to a Dublin civil society group meeting recenty where, among other things, the art of talking to canvassers was discussed. “They’re politicians,” one of the organisers said, “so you can’t talk ethics with them. You have to make financial sense.”

It stayed with me, that idea of politicians as cold-hearted sales people with euro signs in their eyes. Not because I don’t think there’s a smoking gun – but because I found the attitude disheartening. There it was, right at the heart of one of Ireland’s major campaigning bodies: the disillusion.

I don’t mean to say that you get what you deserve. But as much as I take issue with idea that we can think ourselves happy in a flash, I think that there’s a lot to be said for the power of expectation.

Parents have all heard it: don’t tell a child that they’re bold; explain how a specific action is wrong. We must describe kids in positive ways as often as we can, because our perception and expectations of them will make up their sense of self. If they hear often enough that they are bad, pretty soon they will be.

There’s a narrative about politics as corrupt bullshit, about politicians as greedy, power-hungry liars. Then they turn up on our doorstep, and they’re asked: “What’s in it for me?”

I wonder what kind of politicians this rhetoric attracts. I wonder what happens to those deeply devoted to democracy. We can talk about a political class void of ethical concerns, but if we want to talk ethics, we need to put it on the agenda. If we want to live in a world where politics is about more than a transaction of vote for personal gain, we have to start talking about that world when the politicians come knocking on our doors. If we play the neoliberal game and start talking individualism and financial gain the minute they ask us to vote for them, all we’ll get is a flat-tax tax calculator.

“Real change, not spare change,” goes the poster slogan of local AAA candidate, Michael O’Brien. I hated it when I first saw it, found it over-simplistic and banal. The closer to election day it gets, the more profound it seems.