Dear exhausted and devastated you

It’s not hopeless

A heart is a very fragile thing. When it breaks it feels as if there is no way to unbreak it. Everything hurts and it feels as if nothing matters but also everything matters.

How do you repair broken hearts? How do we go on when it feels like there is so much pain in the world? Here are my thoughts…

We are not meant to live like this - seeing a genocide live-streamed, fighting against the indifference of our neighbours, feeling like there’s nothing we can do to help each other.

It is torturous to see the cruelty of an apartheid state, to have to fight fruitlessly against complicity, while knowing that gut-drop feeling is nothing nothing nothing like what those actually facing this are coping with (how does anyone cope?). It is at once the world’s pain, the world’s shame, and not our pain, and all of our shame.

There are private tragedies too. Desperate losses that cannot be communicated. There are deep wells of sadness and tiny and gargantuan fears behind curtains across this country. There’s nothing that compares but our pain also doesn’t feel so small does it, when we’re in it? We only have so much capacity, but we want more don’t we?

How do you keep faith? Faith not in a God but in something better than this?

Where do you find hope? That tiniest spark of it? Enough to light the way to peace?

*

My eldest boy had been hassling me. Asking to please just sit down and see what he’d made on the computer. I can’t help but be caught up. There’s endless washing, the bed is unmade, the cat bowl needs filling, the vacuuming, the prescriptions need to be picked up from the chemist, the dentist appointment, the deadlines, oh the tax return, the school donations, the power bill, and the heater is broken, and then and then and then - How lucky to have the inane domesticity. How can I complain?

He follows me around as I wipe down the tooth paste on the mirror in the bathroom, pick up the towels, say “have you put your uniform in the wash” answer my husband “I fly out tomorrow at 7am”.

I pick up the lone sock on the stairs, shoo the dog, ask if the rubbish has been taken out. And he follows me with his laptop perched on his open hand.

Later, he comes in as I’m furiously typing, trying to manage an inbox that is always full and expectations of me that are always too high.

“Mum, can I show you?”

“Of course darling,” I say, but in my mind, where he can’t reach I’m uncharitable. I have no interest in Minecraft or Roblox or whatever and I have to reply to that email or I won’t get that job and did I just lose another subscriber? Was it me? Am I not doing enough?

He excitedly pushed up against me and pulled my arm around him, he still smells like honey and I know that won’t last long. His legs are almost as long as mine now and we wear the same size shoe and I don’t know when it happened (I’m so lucky to see him grow. I’m so so lucky to see him grow. Don’t ever take that for granted. Don’t ever take that for granted).

He begins to talk about Minecraft and I have to wrench my brain to the present to stop myself thinking about how I need to check if there are fees for cross country. When is it again? My ears are throbbing, am I getting sick again?

And then I hear him.

“I made you this. It’s a house for us in Minecraft. It’s got cherry blossoms because I know you love them. And it’s pink, your favourite colour.”

I look at the screen and see the pixelated paradise he has created. It is beautiful. He smiles brightly at me. “This is me,” he says. “And this is you.”

In this game I am square, all angles. He holds my hand in the game. I have held his heart my whole life. We wander together in this little world of pink cherry trees and mewling cats. He explains that his brother keeps making cats. “He just likes to pat them which is not part of the game. But that’s OK. You can do anything here”.

He asks me if I want to build something with him.

I want to build something with him.

When a heart is broken you have to rebuild. When it’s many hearts, it’s a lot of work, the work never ends, but it’s the most important work.

You must stitch together muscle and tissue with the thread that connects us all.

The thread is humanity, it is community. We feel hope and hopelessness side by side and this is what it is to be human. This is what it is to be part of a community.

When it feels like there’s nothing you can do to change the road we’re on, we have to remind ourselves that despair is the most destructive force.

Despair will tell you that you are powerless, that you’ll always hurt, that what is broken can never be repaired.

That you can’t rebuild.

It is not true.

Tiny acts of gentleness soften the pain. There’s no single act, no lonely thing you can do to fix any one thing - but we can start to build. We can make a place that’s better. We can create something that’s at odds with the cruelty we see.

I believe we can. I believe in us.

I believe in cherry blossoms planted by an eleven-year-old who is trying to show that the world might be turning at a frightening pace but we’re still here trying to be gentle with each other.