Catégorie : English version

 

Parent’s Praise

I readily accept that other parents may be “ better” than I am with their children.

My work day ended at midnight yesterday. I was back home and became a father again this morning. I did my best.

This morning, when my daughter saw me standing up, she walked towards me, smiling, and said:

“ I Just wanted to give you a kiss” or “ I wanted to hold you in my arms”.

My daughter came to hug me and fell on me. When this kind of moment comes, many parents like me are pleased. They tell themselves that they have been good parents since the birth of their children. They think everything is fine. They may also consider that it is really worth being parents. Despite the work and all the commitments that this may involve.

How many true joys do we live in one existence ?  How many joys, at first superb, turn out to be false, derisory, disappointing, deleterious or funereal ?

The attachment of a child is hardly questionable. It is always or often “right”, massive, without calculation, immediate and at the same time very surprising. But also temporary.

Because we are not always available. We are not always well-inspired and well-disposed as parents. As parents and individuals officially “responsible”, “mature” and “ conscious”, we have a number of injunctions and dead ends in our heads. Injunctions and dead ends that we as parents must “ inculcate”.

Injunctions and dead ends that we as parents must also know how to preserve them from.

Preserving them.

To “ make” children, we stop using condoms and any other contraceptive means. And once our children are sown, taken from the “void”, born, present and exposed, we as parents must also know how to preserve them.

We must know how to prevent them.

This morning, I did everything to be as receptive as possible when my daughter was telling me of her good mood and her very good disposition towards me. We were the first day of the weekend, on Saturday. The time of week when she is not at school and even though she has her homework, she will be able to relax and spend time with her parents. Since this weekend, I do not work.

So I listened and looked at my daughter. I also had to do some storage reminders. The two packets of paper tissues and the two sheets I had seen near her school bag were not to remain on the floor.

But it all went well. My daughter went to her swimming class with her mother. And I, “ the match by the fire”, I didn’t get angry. I started my breakfast trying to estimate the time at my fingertips so that I could take some time to write or perhaps go to the market next door.

I did not tell my daughter and my partner about my work day the day before. I tell them little about my work. I usually choose to distinguish between the two worlds. Professional and personal. The mental and emotional. Even if the two atmospheres certainly permeate me. I separate them or do my best to separate them when I am in either. It’s about finding ways out.

But this morning, I was thinking about this almost 15-year old who came out of football training last night and got stabbed in the shoulder to have his mobile phone stolen.

Aorta ruptured. Three cardiac arrests. I heard the news last night while at work. It happened between 8 p.m and 9 p.m.

Despite the mysterious pulmonary embolism I had in late 2023, cardiac arrest is not my field. But I work in a kind of open space where you can see and hear almost in real time the situations announced and the means deployed to deal with them. And then, before I went into psychiatry in 1992, I had first been a trained nurse for somatic care.

The young man was attacked in a good or very good district of Paris. This information was publicized a few hours later.

Almost 15 years old, stabbed for a mobile phone. Both attackers were reportedly arrested.

I imagine two boys slightly older than the victim. I would say:

No more than 20 years old and having already assaulted other people or having a criminal record.

I thought that you really had to live day by day, and again, to hope to get through life by stealing mobile phones until you were ready to kill, pardon, to attack with a knife, for that.

We are really in the immediate result by breaking into, at all costs. For a mobile phone, one is ready to put in shreds younger by stabbing.

The victim’s life is ruined. That of the parents ( who were present at the hospital where their son was) is ruined. The lives of relatives and witnesses may also be ruined. For a mobile phone that will now remain unconnected, offline and in evidence.

Perhaps some people – now rather old at least- still remember the Nokia advertising when the mobile phone was first marketed to the general public in the 1990s. It said :

“Connecting People…”.

The anger of parents and relatives will prevent them from seeing that the life of the aggressors is probably as messed up or was already.

Last night, I tried to imagine what my father’s attitude would be in front of these two attackers. I thought maybe I’d go visit one of the two men regularly in the parlor, in prison, after the conviction. Let’s say once a month. To look at him, to listen to him. To inflict the true sentence on him. To humanize or re-humanize him. To talk about my daughter. Show him two or three pictures of her. One of her, small, against me, and a recent before her death after being stabbed for a mobile phone.

On the street, unless you’re in a settling of scores where you see the other as an enemy or an official rival who takes that status, I think the aggressors most often go after strangers. People they have never seen and will never see again in principle because they live in very different areas and rhythms even opposed and they cross each other by “ opportunism” of for predatory purposes ( here for aggression). Which is very practical to “forget” or trivialize the event since we do not see again or more, “ in principle”, the victim. So we have less to confront with the violence of what we did. We can be all the more convinced that this is part of the past or that the victim has not suffered too much or that she/he will recover from it since we do not have to witness her/his agony.

But I’m probably going too far. The parents and relatives of the young person will be angry and will stay there, for some, for years, so as not to get depressed.

How do you get over that as a parent ? While everything was going well or better where it was going as usual, in an instant, because he was on this street rather than another one, their son got stabbed in the middle of Paris.

No parent can prepare for that. Nor can you keep your child in the same place all the time. So being a parent is a gamble. Nothing is definitively assured despite encouraging promises and all the parental work committed from the beginning. After several years, all this suddenly explodes in your face and throughout your body like a pressure cooker. And, in front of you, there are the aggressors or perpetrators ( people you had never seen, never met before) when they are arrested and tried, who force you to brutally take knowledge of this :

You must trade the oppressive disappearance of a loved one, educated and chosen ( your child) for the imposed and incongruous presence of these strangers. Individuals you have never invoked nor chosen and on whom you will have to rely through their story. A story that you will have to endure and discover during their trial when there is one.

Franck Unimon, Monday 27  of January 2025 for the English version based on the French version of Saturday 25 January 2025.