If your words could change the world…

When my daughter was about seven or so I had a great idea. The idea was to invite loads of children to make a postcard piece of art and writing and to ask them a question:

If my words could change the world what would I say?

Like most of my brilliant ideas, it danced and burned inside me for a while and then fizzled out and got replaced by several new ones.

But during the dancing burning time, I asked the question of my daughter, gave her a postcard, and she wrote:

If my words could change the world I would say: ‘I love my mummy and daddy’

I put it on the wall and read those words over and over again. I allowed them to weave themselves into my understanding of what changing the world means. I wondered about her world and my world and what change she wanted to make.

The purpose of my question was to invite children into a sense that they can be agents of change and that words are important. I wanted to light up their imaginations and sow the seeds of tomorrow’s placards and protest. I was thinking of the whole big world, of climate crisis and social collapse, of justice and injustice and the need to save the bees.

Now I can’t remember whether she wrote those words just before or just after her dad and I separated and tore her world in half. Either way, things were fractured and painful between us and of course she felt that throughout her whole nervous system.

It is only now that I write this, invited by a writing prompt about writing as a radical act, that I get what she wrote. My heart is aching and tears are close as I remember that small vulnerable child whose whole world was her mummy and daddy. Her declaration of radical world changing love put into such simple words her need for her world to stay intact. I am staggered that I didn’t see that then. I was too caught up in it, the stress and distress, the holding together of my bit of her world so that I didn’t drop her off the cliff that I was clinging to.

It was everything for her and impossible for us. For years she told me that the day we separated was the day we ruined her life. She treasured the photographs of the three of us in happy times, and she loved the birthdays and Christmases when we celebrated together, even though they hurt her heart in its longing for her world to be back in one home. Her words were not powerful enough after all to make the change she wanted. Neither were her actions of vigilant care over each moment of tension, her attempts to bring us back together again. My cheery invitation to write a postcard to change the world was a mockery of the reality of her powerlessness.

I bring myself back to the present and ask myself again what would I say on my postcard? If my words could change the world what would I say? I realise that what I do say again and again is that children love their mummies and daddies. I am sideswiped by that realisation which hit me only in this moment of typing, in this radical act of gathering together with others to ask how is writing a radical act?

I write it in many ways with many stories and urgent science and huge complex frameworks of ideas that I am desperate to put into words. I write of mental health and human evolution, of neuroscience and capitalism, of white supremacy and trauma. I write of eldership and the intergenerational abandonment of young people, of climate distress and grief, of the colonisation of human nervous systems by systems of domination. I am making a massive map of all the things in a desperate and driven attempt to show everyone how much sense it all makes and how clear it all is. How we can change the world in one generation if we pay attention to what children really need and how that creates the adults they grow to be and how they create the culture we live in. How the destruction of life on earth and our failure to protect it all boils down to the simple truth that children love their mummies and daddies and that this fundamental everything has been betrayed systematically and with devastating consequences.

What I mean of course is that a child’s need to be safely held in warm love by parents who are supported by a community of warm others is the foundational ingredient of true humanity. When we are collectively deprived of this core condition for health and wholeness we are set on a traumatic trajectory towards disintegration. Just look around, this is what it looks like.

My darling grown girl, I am so sorry it took me so long to realise what you were saying and to recognise the radical world changing truth of it.

(this piece was written on a writing retreat with Max Hope of https://writeonchangemakers.com/. The theme was ‘writing as a radical act’. I was delighted to experience these words emerge spontaneously in this carefully and generously held space.)