I’m not talking about genes.
I’m talking about being ‘pro-life’ in terms of supporting children during development and ensuring that cases where parents cause 60 odd fractures to their children, or deliberately poison, or crush them with car seats, is kept to an absolutely minimum.
Because I know that no matter what, my wife and I would have given our proverbial right arm to have been given the gift that they had repeatedly squandered. But I suppose that some are happy to see headlines about tortured children in order to keep peoples’ precious freedom.
The children would have been tortured no matter the freedoms.
Life doesn't work that way. You can't tell which parents will become abusers and which will take the worst parts of their lives and turn it into fertilizer for their roses.
I understand that you and your wife have tried really hard for children, but that still doesn't stop you from having the potential to abuse. Love and emotional disregulation are not opposing things, they can be happening at the same time.
Mate, I am a child abuse survivor, stories like Star's, Baby P's and Arthur's are my story, except I stayed alive, somehow, and got out. I still get flashbacks and night terrors, my last suicide attempt was just over 3 months ago. I've been having therapy for some years now. And my mum was a good mum, to my sisters, its just something broke inside her around the same time I needed her the most and the two got linked.
I'm a good dad, but everyone has a history, and no matter how hard anyone tries, the past is only as far away as your most recent memory of it. Time doesn't work linearly.
We've had the social services in our children's lives since before they can remember. And while my kids have been watched like hawks, kids like Star, Arthur and Baby P have died by the hands of their parents.
I don't raise my voice to my kids, I don't swear in front of them and I have never, and will never, strike them. But because, away from them and my wife, I have tried to commit suicide on a number of occasions, my children are 'kept' children. It means that for the last few months, I've only been allowed supervised contact with them a couple of times a week. I will change this, but it's a fecking tough battle.
Its what they call proactive intervention. Doing what you think, they think because of my past their is a chance that my mother's mistakes will echo through me, despite any evidence to that. It's actually the opposite, I parent in the exact opposite way that my mum did and my daughters are happy, confident, rounded women.
The government have looked at the balance of probabilities and determined that its worth spending millions of pounds monitoring my family. The fact that I'm brown and Baby P's, Star's and Arthur's parents are all white, lends credence to systematic racism in social services, and these are the people you want vetting potential parents
before they have children? Knowing that some people crumble with the pressure of parenting and others thrive?
I am not talking about genes either, that's nature, I'm talking about how we nurture kids. I'm sorry to say, the likely hood is that your daughter will be traumatised at some point, hope not or hopefully not more than once, but it's how you deal with the traumas and safeguard as much as you can. Just as every foetus has the potential of being a human, every person has the potential of being a good parent. In both cases, you don't know until birth.
I know this is a very emotive subject, just as the abortion debate is, but both come down to the same thing, freedom of choice.
