Hey, wait. I got a new complaint

On children and war

Last week, the powers that be in Europe sent out a video on what to put in our backpacks to survive 72 hours should war break out. It was a kind of upbeat message that made me smile as the protagonist pulled out all the must-haves for the bombing season from her tiny bag, à la Mary Poppins.¹

This time² I decided to take the task seriously and make our own survival kit. I set forth into the wild with P and CA to search for what was missing from our capsule wardrobe: the collective weight of the whole family in batteries, AA and AAA — you never know which size will fit best (I’m tempted to stock up on lemons and learn how to power a house with them³; a good lemon-water cleanse is always in order); a battery-powered radio, to hear the reports of advancing troops and the shade of their uniforms, always be a step ahead of the upcoming colour palette; some light sources: two torches, candles, a lighter and matchboxes to light up the runway scape route; some canned food, all gourmet selections. All we are missing is some portable mini solar panel to charge our useless phones and get a sun tan, and some cash — C votes to get dollars, I am eyeing the Monopoly bank notes, the children offer the coins in their piggy bank.

I’ve always known children will save the world. Possibly that’s why so many people are intent on wiping them off the map, lest they become functional adults, or worse: kind ones.

Bad people need bombing, they explain on the news, and yet the aftermath always seems full of dead children instead. Cold children. Hungry children. Robbed children.

When I started writing here, I promised myself and my readers that I wouldn’t write about politics, and I won’t. But I scroll through Notes on Substack and an avalanche of useless posts from indignant people crushes me. I can barely breathe. I read people so angry with the status quo that they feel compelled to let the rest of us know exactly what they think. Irate crowds, posting about how it all affects them.

“Restack if you think Elon Musk is a moron.”

“Share if you, like me, are fuming about the genocide in Gaza.”

“Like if you think Putin is the devil incarnate.”

Yeah. That’ll teach the baddies. I see them now, trembling in their headquarters, frowning at the memes mocking them online, deeply unsettled by the ‘likes’ they aren’t getting.

I do not hate on strangers that post their outrage online and then either seem to sit there steeped in fury or get on with their day, basking in the warm glow of having fulfilled their civic duty. I do, however, cultivate a very carefully curated antipathy for complainers whose main task in life seems to be wallowing in annoyance, oozing upset, revelling in irritation, and needing to let us all know about it. The kind of people who, when asked for solutions or offered potential fixes to soothe their soreness, stare at you with a blank gaze.

I used to be a complainer. Mine was not an all-encompassing disdain for my personal circumstances, but the discomfort was enough to warrant three beers and a couple of cigarettes any given Monday evening, moaning about how much work I had and how the system was malfunctioning, how the rest of the world seemed to be dumb, or how my boss had an absurd number of patients every day that I had to help with.

This was more or less in my mid-to-late twenties, during my first contact with cancer care in the overcrowded halls of a Spanish hospital, where I would sit down at the desk at 8 a.m. and get up at 3 p.m., half-dehydrated, with the pile of reports on the patients I had seen and thinking, “What just happened?” Then I would spend the next two hours munching a soggy sandwich, going over the medical decisions I had made that day with a nauseating feeling of impending doom at the possibility that I had made a terrible medical mistake and had sent someone prematurely to their grave. I would later go home just to babble on and on about how I hated it all, how unfair it was that I had to treat all the cancer patients in the world, how nothing worked in public hospitals, and how the rest of the world was just lazy⁴.

I wish I could tell you that my patients cured me from my self-commiseration, that I could say, for example, how meeting M, a metastatic breast cancer patient who had been more than five years progressing through different treatments and always came to her appointments with a smile on her face and with no complaint to be had, made me realise that I could be better. Not even did I get how useless complaining was the day we told her we had nothing better to offer her, and she told us that it was a shame because she had a teenager with an eating disorder at home and she wanted to see her through it before she passed away. And then she went home to get ready for the end, not breathing a word of dissatisfaction or about the unfairness of it all.

I wish I could tell you I was a better person because I met her. But it was not M who made the click in my head.

I became a recovering complainer when my ex — who was not my ex back then — approached me in an unusually brutal manner with an analogy I will cherish forever:

“You see, Ana?” he said, tired of my misery. “Let me put it this way. Let’s say the room is green, and it is a shitty colour for a room. Let’s say you want it white. And every evening you come home telling me the room is green and you want it white, and every morning you go back to the green room that did not magically become white overnight, and you sit there and you stare at the green walls and then come back and you cry about the hideous colour that, each day, you hate more and more. Might I suggest at this point that you either buy some fucking white paint or move to a house where there are only white rooms to be had? And if neither are a possibility, you might as well learn to love the fucking green walls.”

That’s when it hit me. How had I been so blind? M never complained about how she had breast cancer and a sick daughter because lamenting would not change her circumstances. Whining might poison the air a bit, but that was about it in terms of achievements.

I hope she had friends to talk to about her fears and her wishes, and a loving community who would take over taking care of her child after her passing. And I wish I had paid more attention, had been a little bit more gentle, or thought about accommodating her scheduled visits a bit better to her needs. She never asked for it, but I wish I would have offered.

As a recovering complainer, I have gotten so good at spotting fellow addicts and running away from any attempt at consolation. Complainers don’t want solutions; they want woe. I have also developed a strong aversion to their presence, much like when you quit smoking and then detest the smell of it, no matter how faint it is.

I cannot even tolerate it from my children. To illustrate with an example, I took CA to her swimming class on a chilly February Sunday morning. I advised her to wear a woolly hat under the bike helmet, but she did not listen. The longest seven-minute bike ride in history followed, with her constant cry that her frozen ears would fall off. At some point, I wished they would fall off so that she would shut up about it. On the way back, I gave her my hat, and she looked at me with loving eyes.

“Mamà, you don’t want me to be cold? You really love me.”

“Not so much, really. I just don’t want to hear you complain.”

I wish I could tell you that since then she has never left her hat at home, but the truth is that raising children is not that easy. Nevertheless, I soldier on.

Reports of children dying torture me, but I am not special. I think it is safe to say that, unless one is a psychopath, most people will read about children dying and bombed hospitals with a heavy heart.

But heavy hearts and hashtags don’t rescue people from under the rubble. Tweets and memes don’t change foreign policy. Indignant posts with a superlative amount of exclamation marks don’t hand out humanitarian aid.

None of this helps, I know, and it pains me — but my pain does not alleviate other people’s drama, nor does it make me a better person. So I scratch my brain and think about what is in my power to change a person’s life, and I make small changes that might or might not help those in need, here or abroad.

I so much hope my little grain of sand adds something, and if it doesn’t, I reassess — but I won’t complain about it.

My three children in their first passport picture. They are so different C and I joke we took the wrong one from the hospital every time. In between laughters I pray I can always keep them safe.

I sometimes catch myself trying to love all of childhood through my children. I will kiss them one more time, I will hug them a little bit harder, I will say “I love you” every other sentence, as if that were all a spell that could keep them safe, a ritual that might protect an unknown child out there.

Like the butterflies that bat their wings here and cause a hurricane over there — if I squeeze P, CA, or E a little harder, maybe the shift of atoms here will suffice to divert the trajectory of some missile over there, just enough to miss that other child whose name I cannot pronounce, whose face I do not see, whose fate I will never know.

1. You can see the video here or google Preparedness Bag for a 72 Hour survival - YouTube

2. I wrote about survival kits before- you can read it here.

3. Here is the tutorial.

4. None of this was quite like that, but complainers will see it that way. Also, most people are not lazy, but complainers think they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. I thought I should clarify that.