I saw my estranged father on the train & all I got was this lousy column
December 19, 2017 2:22 PM   Subscribe

The New Statesman's Stephen Bush writes – “On the Tube, I saw the father I’d never met – and was happy to find that I had nothing to say to him. I looked at my feet and walked past the man who had no idea that I was his son.” More importantly, though – “He couldn’t know, close to 30 years ago, that the child he was walking out on would have the good fortune to be born into a country about to experience close to two decades of uninterrupted, low-inflation growth, most of that presided over by a Labour government firmly committed to improving the condition of the poor.”

He doesn't hold a grievance – “My father couldn’t know that I would benefit from investment in schools, museums and fantastic teachers, and the world’s best mother. But I did, which means that while a number of people – the taxpayer, society, my mum – have a legitimate grievance against my father, I don’t, not really. It worked out OK.”

Except against the people who choose to deny today's children of single parents his opportunities – “The dispiriting truth is that it might be different today: child poverty has increased every year for the past three years, even during periods of economic growth. Changes to the child maintenance regime have made it even harder to force absent parents to pay up, while the botched introduction of Universal Credit makes it more difficult for single parents in work to stay out of poverty.”

Title from Bush's own Tweet about the article.
posted by ambrosen (5 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
This could be me - well, minus the Britishness of it - and the research angle of it. Never met my biological father who left my family when I was 1ish. Never had a care to.
posted by drewbage1847 at 4:31 PM on December 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


A few years ago I saw my estranged father for the first time in decades when he came into my convenience store late at night. I only recognised him as he'd been local-paper famous for a number of years.

"There's your change," I said.

"Good man," he said.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 5:26 PM on December 19, 2017 [14 favorites]


Related, but very different - Meet me on the bridge: prepare Some tissues
posted by growabrain at 5:30 PM on December 19, 2017 [3 favorites]


Great post. Thanks.

Like the writer, I too grew up in a UK single-parent home. However, unlike the writer, my own father died when I was eleven, so there was scant chance of me bumping into him on a Tube platform. But, like the writer, I too benefited from "investment in schools, museums and fantastic teachers, and the world’s best mother". In retrospect, I too was very fortunate.

Today's UK single-parent kids? Living in a country where the government's austerity agenda grinds on. To wit, Tory policies are making social mobility and child poverty even worse and Child poverty will 'increase due to benefit cuts'.
posted by Mister Bijou at 1:50 AM on December 20, 2017 [3 favorites]


My English father also was raised without a dad (he was the product of an affair and the sperm donor kept dating my grandmother for years without acknowledging his own son). But that was during/after the War and he was raised in poverty without good teachers, museums or much of a safety net. He was often in the Bernardo Homes (awful orphanages) that permanently ruined his feet with too small shoes. He got into minor legal trouble as a young teen (he stole a double decker bus at 13 and drove it around Cambridge with his mates hanging off the back) and was a teddy boy and was done with school at 15 to enter the world of manual labour. Christmas was always a huge deal to him - I always got hundreds of presents because he never had a Christmas himself as a boy. Meeting my mum was really his saving grace and made him a better man by finally having the family support that wasn't replicated by the state. He saw his dad once, in the Unicorn when he was in his twenties, but also chose not to say anything to the stranger.
posted by saucysault at 7:28 AM on December 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


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