I feel very tired. Twenty years of tired. I don’t feel old enough to be a mother with that much long service on my ribbon-bar! Yet this is only the first offspring, I’ve still another two years before the younger one hits this milestone, or the more glittering one of next year.

I’m told that I have two delightful children who are intelligent, organised and sensible. Quite likely to be good solid citizens and productive members of society as they grow and acquire a little more experience. I must have done something right to get them this far, my mother seems to think it’s because I have always treated them as if they are full human beings even when they were very small, explaining things to them in simple words and ways they could comprehend that got more complicated as they got bigger. I don’t know. Perhaps I will see whether the way I raised my children really works when they are busy raising the next generation in a few years time … but if I thought I was too young to be the mother of a twenty year old now, I KNOW I am definitely too young to be a grandmother any time soon! (Though I won’t deny that being an ‘honourary great-aunt’ to a friends small boy is quite a delight. Definitely the best bit is being able to give the blighter back when he starts being obnoxious!)

The eldest decided that for her birthday she would celebrate by going horse-riding with a friend, so I didn’t actually see her until I got home from the meetings I have on Monday nights. The crazy thing is, I missed her so much that when I actually could give her the birthday hug I had wanted to all day, it was if I was holding the most fragile ancient of books that had never seen the light of day in thousands of years and at the same time the strongest, wiriest, most supple of creatures that could carry whatever she desired through to completion. It amazed me that this competent young woman had once been my tiny baby, or how much her arrival changed me; how I lived, how I looked at myself, what I wanted out of life. It amazed me the passion that holding that scrap of humanity stirred in me! It still amazes me.
Then I did it again and her brother was born. Two scraps that make me ache even now with the love that I have for them, and realise that I would still do almost anything for them. Not that they would ask me, I don’t think. They are both pretty independent, and I marvel that they are that too.

The thing that gets me is that there are people in the world who don’t see children that way.
Just today there have been reports that Australian men are going overseas to countries like Cambodia and copulating with children. People are getting all het up that “… children are being exploited”, yet on talk-back radio this afternoon there were only one or two who pointed out that poverty and starvation will drive many into doing things that they never thought they would do otherwise, just in order to survive. It is all very well mouthing on about tracking these men down and punishing them after the deed is done, but in reality few of these prosecutions ever actually happen. The question for me is WHY do these men, and it is still primarily men, prefer to exploit these children to gratify them-selves?

There are lots of lovely theories around that suggest that one of the reasons that this sort of sex-trade still exists is because these men need to feel powerful and in control. By copulating with children it fuels the fantasy of not only being bigger and more powerful than they are in the rest of their lives, it also fuels the fantasy of virginity that is still prized in our culture … a product that is obtainable only once in an individual’s life and these people want that rare and delicate thing.
They don’t see these children as people. They seem to be seen as things, products/commodities for sale to the highest bidder.

Given the choice, I would imagine that most of these children would far rather be working at almost any other trade if it gave them enough to live on … rather than being the prey of sad gits who need something to be powerful over. Yet what work is there available for them to do? And in that, are my own middle-class and western prejudices showing?
Would not primarily these children be better off learning the basics of reading and writing and a trade of some sort? Would they not rather be playing in the sunshine with full bellies, laughing and crying and learning that the world is an amazing place? Instead they find them-selves servicing men whose own countries find the sexual use of children to be obscene. But that is all right, because obscene is an old Greek word used to describe the horrors that took place off stage like rape and murder, and you can’t get much more off stage than an impoverished country with too many mouths to feed.

But what can I do? How can I make a difference that will prevent young children having to face this sort of work, just to survive… or do I just do nothing, because at least by working this way, these small souls have a chance to live long enough to (vain hope against all historical or statistical information to the opposite conclusion) escape and do some other less degrading trade that? I don’t know. I just know that looking at my children as they have grown and thrived, I hope somehow, somewhere a difference can be made, and that children not so lucky as mine find someone who can give them a chance to be other than a plaything for a sad git.