THE WAY THINGS ARE

Are our complaints petty or real? A shoe mender I knew had a sign on his wall: I had no shoes and I felt sorry for myself until I met a man who had no feet. Missing water when the well runs dry became our recent uneasy reminder that climate change is real. It’s only when something goes wrong, we realise that things we took for granted – position, wealth, health, love – can change from better to worse.

Everyone has some addiction; harmless ones are controlled by a little willpower, serious dependence, not so simple. We all occasionally wallow in undeserved self-pity; some can also feel deep sympathy for those worse off physically or mentally, taking on a burden not of their own making.

A thoroughly professional nurse waited till she went home after work to cry, her duty – caring for babies born to cocaine addicts. It broke her heart to see a baby start its life in withdrawal, and being present as those tiny bodies suffered not a natural health problem, but one imposed by a mother’s addiction.

I once saw a grandmother on holiday here, giving beer to a five-year-old who drank it enthusiastically. She saw my horrified gaze and shrugged, ‘Her mother drank all through her pregnancy.’ Whenever the grandparents had a beer, the child demanded some. I suggested gently they should get medical advice to help her off the habit. The answer: ‘She throws a tantrum if we don’t give her some, and that official stuff is trouble to sort out.’ Placating the child instead of going through procedures to control the addiction, meant at that tender age, the couple’s granddaughter had the same addiction as her alcoholic mother.

A young friend tried three times to carry a baby, desperately wanting a family, taking every precaution, but could never successfully bring pregnancy to term. Cases like mother-addiction to drugs, alcohol or smoking appall her at the unfairness of life. The home she could offer a baby compared to the misery ahead of a child born to be abused, or with an addiction or damaged health because of a mother’s uncontrolled habit.

Pregnancy avoidance is mostly left up to women. The long-awaited male pill hovers but will men use it or will they fear side effects that women have had to cope with, shrug and say, ‘Women have been doing it up to now, why risk it?’ The burden or joy of pregnancy is with women, the snarl of complications over unwanted pregnancy, abortion, birth control, all mostly theirs.

I was feeling sorry for myself when a power outage killed my old laptop. My dependence on an email or a phone number instantly rising on the marvellous devices available, usurped a lifetime habit of writing things down in a notebook. After school, an amiable teen near me, spends his time sitting on the steps of a building on his phone. When the sun moves, he moves to another spot, still finger-marathoning the keys; he walks to school scrolling.

I wonder if his lifetime habit, now forming as with so many other young people, will mean that in their future, human memory, once depended on to recall names, addresses, numbers, will be considered unnecessary – until machines hit a glitch, satellites are damaged by space debris or a massive cyber enemy strike and there is no record of the contacts needed.

Me fein-ism is the Irish term for people who always put their own desires first. The self-absorbed distance themselves from anyone or anything that might use up precious energy they could spend on themselves. Self-preservation is in our DNA but we evolved to create cooperative communities. Well, some of us did.