The opening part of this poem is a magnificent sequence, a litany of all kinds of accusations to children, saying that they’re puritans and unforgiving, that they’re cynical about adults’ capacity to change and that they hold adults to account, that they’re unnuanced and that they watch adults, they’re violent, they’re intolerant of the sex lives of their parents and disapproving, that they can be hypocrites and that they can be entitled, because they’re entirely focused on the self. Having received it, they now wish to go back in time and find a way to apologize to the parents, who seem much more reasonable now that you’ve become one than they seemed when you were just their child. True enough as it is, I think lots of people would go, My God, yeah, wait’ll you hear the story about my little one.Īnd then the poem turns: “On behalf of my younger self I apologise.” And it sounds like the speaker in this poem is reflecting on their life as a young person, as a child, and realizing that, as a result of becoming a parent themselves, that they want to apologize that they’re suddenly seeing the standards that they held their parents to, when they were a child, are exhausting and tiring and nowhere near as reasonable as it seemed to them, when they were a child. The whole thing builds up like a piece of theater. Oh my God, you just called them “autocracies.” You can’t call them that. Initially, you’re reading it, going, You can’t say that about children! You definitely can’t say that. “We kneel to tie the laces of their unfeasibly tiny shoes.” Spaghetti hoops at the wall! Imagine having suchĬonfidence in your innate philosophy of love! Imagine expecting universal loyalty whilst flinging Imagine bellowing criticismįrom the stalls after seeing two minutes of a play! Responding to an imagined society governedĪbout tigers coming to tea. I was operating under a false consciousness, To my parents for the simplistic, ill-informedĪnd ignorant questions I hurled concerning “On behalf of my younger self I apologise The tsarist autocracy of pre-revolution Russia. Of the perfect family! Little children are like Their relentless indignation! Their fascist vision Parents aren’t permittedĮven the smallest private perversion yet a childĬan secretly urinate in a drawer for three weeks They believeĮvery adult should be locked into a sexless yet eternalĮven a lunchbox, and be completely transparentĪnd open to feedback 24/7. Is predictably brutal, especially for women. Their mothers to bring home a sexy stranger They’ll head-bang a breast or stuff a sticky hand They sit in plastic umpire chairs at the dinner table Nuance is irrelevant to the infant moralist. ![]() Position on divorce aligns with the Vatican City. Their stanceĪgainst marital infidelity is Victorian and their ![]() In the concept of rehabilitation for adults.įorgivable mistakes occur before sixteen,Īfter that you’re on your own. ![]() And I said it to my brother later on that night, to go, “Mum said to me she doesn’t give a shit about my stories.” And my brother laughed more than I’d ever heard him laugh, at that stage in our small lives. As far as I was concerned, that is a terrible thing to say to a child. And she turned to me and said, “Pádraig, I don’t give a shit.” And I was aghast. Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and once, when I was seven, I think, I was telling my mother some endless story while she was trying to get the shopping done in a supermarket.
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