Madeleine McCann Is Every Parent’s Bogeyman
MADDIE WATCH – Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann: Michael White’s poppy pornography and Our Spanish Maddie keeps Shannon Kyle in work.
FIRST up, the Guardian’s Michael White tells us about how the “pornography of grief has devalued poignancy of the poppy” and how Madeleine McCann is implicated in it:
The Victorians made a lot of fuss over death too. Just look at those tombstones: exotic, even erotic, in old cemeteries. But at least it was the deaths of their own loved ones they were mourning. Death was everywhere all the time before the development of modern antibiotics.
Now death sits in rest homes, impatiently waiting for life to finish swirling round the plug hole.
We, who have so little experience of it by comparison, have forgotten how to handle the great unknown in a largely godless age. Hence the macabre fuss over Princess Di, over missing Madeleine McCann and over poor, abused Jade Goody too.
Jade Goody gets two adjectives; Our Maddie gets none.
After White, the Guardian gives space to Shannon Kyle to deliver yet another of those Odes To Parenting, in which Our Maddie is the parent’s bogeyman:
She’s talking out leaving her child at home alone:
The government says children have different levels of maturity and responsibility at different ages. What does that really mean? A friend who works for the NSPCC shocked me when she said there is no legal level and it’s all about choice.
Shocking, indeed, that this Government should let a parent make a choice about their own children, perhaps even speak to them without mediation or a therapist.
While leaving a toddler alone in a cot with a bottle of milk wouldn’t go down well with the authorities, for obvious reasons, on the other hand Madeleine McCann’s parents were forgiven by some for leaving a three-year-old and two-year-old twins alone in a Spanish resort room.
She went missing in Spain? How’s that for research. Having introduced the missing child into the story, Kyle bring sit back to herself:
A few months ago, I left my eight-year-old alone for 10 minutes in my flat while I nipped to the shops to get some milk – OK, wine. I asked her to come with me. She was watching TV and the prospect of getting shoes on and missing her shouty American show on Nickelodeon was apparently too much to bear.
I quickly ran through the “what ifs”. If anyone rings the doorbell, don’t answer it. Here’s my mobile in case of an emergency. I left the flat, found myself half running to the nearby shop, a creeping sense of guilt rising in my guts. I berated myself for not telling C not to eat anything. What if at that exact moment she was choking to death on a grape?
Or being kidnapped? Or calling Child Line? Or changing the locks?
I got back to find my daughter was still sofa-ridden, her eyes fixed on the TV. She didn’t even acknowledge my homecoming.
Kids. Who’d bother?
I needed a glass of wine after that. But am I right to beat myself up?
Yes you are. Kyle’s kid then walks to school with two older girls:
I know it is a risk letting her walk: I feel that every time our lips brush goodbye. But I get an hour extra in the morning to work or even go to the gym, and she gets a sliver of preciously savoured independence. It works. The benefits outweigh the risks.
A whole hour to work and write about your daughter going to school on her own-ish.
Madeleine McCann – victimising parents for over two years. Tsk!
Posted: 13th, November 2009 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
