On the most extraordinary human achievements you’ll never, ever notice, and possibly shouldn’t celebrate.
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We’re all in therapy these days, everyone in the Veja-heeled milieu I find myself in anyway, so we know exactly what we’re up against in this thing called life. We might always pursue distant, unavailable lovers and we understand exactly why (anxious attachment style + daddy issues). The clutch marks of our narcissistic mothers might fade, but they’ll always be visible. That kind of thing. The stuff you discuss for an hour every Thursday morning in a sunlit office in the Titirangi bush.
Life is so hard. Not that you’d dare say so outside the walls of the therapy office, or even very often inside them: you know how good you have it compared to most. In fact, you dedicate a good chunk of every session to ensuring your therapist knows you know how “privileged” you are (for some reason, you never just say “lucky”.) For 30 minutes, you lament the soul-draining quality of your bullshit email job, careful all the while not to veer too far into self-pity. “Of course, 40,000 children are currently mining for cobalt in the Congo just to power our horrid smartphones,” you say with all the gusto of the kid at the front of the classroom, “so I know this is a first-world problem.” Patiently suppressing the urge to roll her eyes, your therapist will gently persuade you that, in this room at least, it’s OK to sometimes feel bereft, desolate or furious, even as you move through an outwardly enviable life.
You feel your throat constrict and your eyes well with tears. “My mother,” you eventually choke out between sobs. “My mother was so, so cold.”
Time’s up.
Your therapist is right: inside the walls of her office, it is permissible, even advisable, to talk and cry and talk and cry about your cold, cold mother, and you should do it without simultaneously self-flagellating about how lucky you are. But we are not inside the walls of your therapy office now. We’re talking to each other over the internet, and we won’t be talking much about you. We’ll be talking about the cobalt kids.
By “cobalt kids” I’m casting a broad net, catching literal Congolese child miners, clearly, but also everyone else living a truly hard life. The addicts, the orphans, the lumpens and the outcasts – “people living on the margins,” as my cohort loves to say. To bring it home, let’s picture a 12-year-old girl called Jade, living in emergency housing in Rotorua. It is going to get really, really heavy for three paragraphs now, so stop reading if you’re not feeling up to it, otherwise bear with me – and Jade.
Jade lives in a filthy motel on the Golden Mile with her mother, stepfather and two younger half-siblings. Jade’s mother, Iris, is pregnant. Most nights, Iris drinks cheap bourbon until she passes out on the double bed in the filthy living room; Jade and her half-siblings sleep in the adjacent bedroom. While Iris slumbers deeply, Jade’s stepfather enters her bedroom and forces her to fellate him to the point of orgasm, then returns in silence to Iris’s bed. Once, Jade tried to tell her mother this was happening. Iris muttered something incoherent about Jade being a “jealous bitch”, so Jade never mentioned it again and endures the assaults in silence, including on the most literal level: she’s careful never to wake her siblings during the blowjobs she’s forced to perform. She doesn’t want the memory of seeing that to scar them forever.
Jade has foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, but she understands, at least on some level, why her mother won’t protect her. Her stepdad beats up Iris regularly – full-on, proper hidings – and sometimes Jade’s half-brother gets the bash, too (Jade and her half-sister are spared the beatings, at least, for reasons she doesn’t understand). Sometimes Jade’s stepdad goes off on meth benders that last for days, and this is usually a period of respite. But lately, while he’s gone, a security guard at the motel – a patched gang member – has been using a master set of keys to enter their motel unit and perform “checks”. When he’s inside, he rifles through the fridge and pressures both Iris and Jade to have sex with him. So far they’ve both resisted, but the pressure is getting heavier. It makes Jade feel sick to think of her mum having to fuck the guard while she’s pregnant, and horrified about what Iris would endure if Jade’s stepdad found out, so Jade, convinced she is worthless and disposable anyway, decides she will offer herself up to the guard instead.
Jade doesn’t know it yet, but in two years’ time a younger gang prospect, James, will show romantic interest in her, if “romantic” is the right term, and she’ll move into the state housing unit he lives in with his family. Here, at least, the only person who beats and rapes her is James. They have four kids together in quick succession.
We’re done with the really heavy bit now.
If you were a fly on the wall in Jade’s home, now that she’s a mother, would you judge her for smacking her kids? For telling them again and again that they’re “little shits”? For drinking throughout her pregnancies to numb the pain? Picture the scene: Jade’s fourth kid is a six-month-old baby, and he has colic. He’s screaming blue murder and she can’t get him to settle. She’s broke, she’s bruised, she’s hungry, she’s sore, she’s overwhelmed and exhausted to breaking point – she also has reduced impulse control because of her foetal alcohol disorder, remember, and several new head injuries. As the baby screams, Jade hears her six-year-old daughter shriek, turning around to catch her slapping her five-year-old brother.
A tide of fury rises within Jade. Enough is enough. She pictures herself marching towards her six-year-old and slapping her across the face, hard. “See how you like it!” she imagines bellowing as her daughter’s face crumbles before her eyes.
If this is how it plays out, will you stand in judgement, there in your spot on the wall?
It isn’t. This is what Jade actually does: “That’s enough, you two,” she says. Her voice is firm, but she isn’t yelling. “Get your arses outside and play.” Still holding the baby, she leads her daughter and son outside to the carpark and watches them kick a beer can around in the middle distance. She sits on the steps and lights a cigarette, and the baby finally stops screaming. The kids are laughing now, friends again. Bloody ratbags, Jade thinks, taking four quick drags of the durry she’s holding between two trembling fingers. Finally her hands stop shaking, and she puts the cigarette out on the steps. “Get back inside now,” she says.
Jade does this every time her kids are winding her up. She knows secondhand smoke isn’t good for the kids, especially the baby, but she never finishes the whole cigarette. She also never hits the kids. Not once. Every so often she’ll lose her rag and yell, but she doesn’t scream fucked up things at them, like that they were “mistakes” or she “never wanted them” (both Iris classics) and she definitely doesn’t do any weird pedo shit to them.
In other words, Jade is basically a good mum. She starts working shifts at PaknSave when the baby turns one, and the kids go to James’ mum after school, a gruff but trustworthy woman living in a state house nearby. (James left the picture after Jade fell pregnant with baby number four; no one knows where he went, including his mother.) When they’re not with their nana or at school, the kids muck around in the two-bedroom rental Jade just scratches by to afford.
In her short life – Jade loses a battle with throat cancer in her late 50s – she never studies; she never works a job paying more than minimum wage; and she obviously never cures cancer or travels into space. But she raises four pretty good kids. They’re all a bit cheeky in class and get into the occasional tussle in the playground, but they outgrow their violent streaks. All of them. One of the boys goes through a car-stealing phase, but otherwise they all stay on the right side of the law, and like Jade, work steady, low-wage jobs their whole lives. The girl even studies to be a nurse.
What I’m saying is, Jade should probably get the Nobel Prize in Not Beating Up Your Kids.
Think of the people we collectively celebrate at any given time. Sometimes they’re absolute scumbags, like Cecil Rhodes or Harvey Weinstein, sometimes they’re fine but overrated, like Jacinda Ardern or Rihanna, and sometimes they’re true greats doing invaluable work (Helen Kelly, Cormac McCarthy). Our metric, though, is always what these figures add to the world: great novels, fun pop music, a more robust trade union movement, new extractive colonies.
But what about the people whose main social contribution is subtractive? The silent sponges like Jade, who soak up the violence and ugliness that was their sole inheritance, so that no one else is stained by it? Shouldn’t we celebrate them, too?
Maybe not. There are some problems with my new Nobel Prize category. The most vexing one rears its head when you apply the same logic to other kinds of offending. Let’s use the sexual abuse of children, because it’s the one everyone hates most of all.
Imagine a man called Liam who discovers, to his abject horror, that he has a sexual attraction to children. Spend a minute filling in Liam’s backstory, so that every card is stacked against him developing a normal sexuality. Liam’s own pedo stepdad crept into his bedroom night after night when he was a kid, and also left his fucked-up kiddie porn all over the computer Liam used as a teen; Liam has a foetal alcohol disorder that inhibits his impulse control, just like Jade; Liam inherited a meth addiction from his mother; Liam’s had several head injuries. Give him the whole works. Perfectly tend the soil so that a child sex offender will grow in it, then plant the Liam seed.
Now, imagine that, against all odds, Liam goes his entire life without so much as laying a finger on a kid. If we’re treating him like I’ve suggested we might treat Jade, he deserves the Nobel Prize in Not Molesting Kids.
Much harder to swallow, isn’t it?
But if Liam goes a whole lifetime without sexually abusing a child, he has definitely exercised more moral restraint than me, say, a writer in her 30s with 99 psychological problems, not one of which is a sexual attraction to kids. He hasn’t exactly done good, but like Jade, he seems to have sponged up some bad; broken a terrible chain of events that seemed destined to result in intergenerational suffering by defenceless kids.
Does it make any sense to commend a non-action, and to commend certain non-actors more than others? It feels like sometimes it does. If you are perfectly full and don’t take candy from a baby, you have behaved neutrally, but if you are starving and don’t take candy from a baby, wasn’t your non-action more noble? More admirable?
But can a moral framework that commends restraint hold the line against excusing transgression?
I don’t know. The whole thing makes me feel sick to think about. I can imagine a row of moral philosophers shaking their heads at my logic, and I panic thinking about how a child sex offender could twist it to exculpate themselves. Maybe the Nobel Prize in Not Traumatising Children is a bad idea. But in my heart of hearts, I still think Jade deserves it.
Let’s leave the moral quandaries, and return to your therapy sessions.
Recall the scroll of advantages you roll out and recite in front of your therapist before you allow yourself to feel sad in her office. The soul-deadening email job you know most people would kill for (“Of course, I know it’s a privilege to even…”). Your Masters from the International Institute of Modern Letters (“Believe me, I know how privileged it sounds to even…”). Your relatively dry and mould-free house; your ability to afford $180 therapy sessions; your complete lack of type 2 diabetes. You have never mined for cobalt, not even as an adult.
Recall, now, how hard your life has been. It has. Don’t start rolling out and reciting from the scroll for me. I know how much your cold, cold mother hurt you. I hate that she treated you like that, and it’s not a first-world problem. (Do you think the Congolese don’t have mummy issues?) I want you to let out big, choking sobs in front of your gentle, nodding therapist until you feel a glow of catharsis and clarity, and I want you to keep doing this until you feel better. You deserve it. You do. Everyone does.
Outside your therapist’s office, think from time to time about Jade. Don’t use her as more guilt-fodder for your scroll, just think about her. Jade’s mother was as cold as it gets – a stone-cold bitch who threw her daughter to the wolves – but Jade will never sob cathartic tears in a therapist’s office in the peaceful Titirangi bush. She can’t afford the fees or navigate the ACC system, and she wouldn’t do therapy even if she could. Besides, she’ll be dead soon (throat cancer, remember). Her life blazes out like a dud firework: she is here and then she isn’t, and in the meantime she achieves nothing you’ll ever read about in the culture section of Viva or the Order of Merit announcements. She was born to a cold, terrible mother, she spent her teenage years being tortured and humiliated by monstrous men, and then, inexplicably, through some incredible act of will or fate or working of the holy spirit, she generated love and warmth for her kids. She spent the rest of her life working and raising them without violence or abuse, sponging some suffering out of the world.
I can’t decide if she deserves the Nobel Prize in Not Beating Up Your Kids. I probably need to read some more moral philosophy first. But if you see her, or someone like her, smoking half a cigarette in a carpark with a six-month-old baby on her knee, her snot-nosed kids screeching playfully in the distance, give her all my love.
