Hannah/Muddling Along published this post on 12 May, 2011...
Yesterday Madeleine McCann should have been celebrating her 8th birthday with her family. But she isn’t. Her parents last saw her on Thursday 3rd May 2007. Four years on, Kate McCann has written about her experiences. The abduction of her daughter is seared into our consciousness – the dinner with friends 100 yards away, regular checking of the children in their apartment and then the awful discovery that her daughter was missing and her reaction that she describes as “nausea, terror, disbelief, fear, icy fear, dear God.”
And that kind of unending anguish is not going to be easy to read and I’m not sure something I could bear to read.
Perhaps it was because unending anguish isn’t really much of a read that the British press tried to find new things to write about.
Perhaps why instead of printing about the previous incidents on the Algarve of paedophiles entering children’s rooms and attempted abductions, they started to look around for other angles and stories and for some reason decided that the gaunt and frozen parents were a suitable target.
Or perhaps it was because those parents were so stricken by grief and worry that they didn’t enact whatever it was that the Great British Public had decided was an appropriate amount of public grief. That because they were able to do no more than quietly and blankly mechanically carry on in public obviously meant that there had to be something up, not that they were literally unable to do more than to try and keep holding themselves together for the sake of their other children.
The ‘crime’ for which Kate and Gerry McCann were sentenced to the full howling fury of the British media and public was for doing what many other parents did and continue to do – to go on holiday with friends to somewhere family friendly, to have dinner close by with your apartment in view, to check on your children regularly.
But perhaps it was because they were parents like us doing things like us that they had to be demonised so that we could create some distance between them and us.
That if they were somehow culpable then those moments when we take a calculated risk, as they had done, wouldn’t feel so risky, so bad and with such potentially awful consequences.
Did we have to hate them because deep down, hidden away in the depths of our parenting fears is that awful acid worry that somehow, someday, something equally awful could touch us and our family like it did theirs?
For some more great posts from Hannah/Muddling Along, click here.
See moreBack to All Best Blogs articles
