Once again as I sit and write out the messages of love for your ‘Tree of Hope,’ I am moved beyond words.
The love each and every message carries is so powerful and my heart aches for each and every grandchild unable to see their grandparents.
We rightly focus on the children as we always must, but one message in particular shows that everyone is affected by unjustified estrangement.
Dearest ….,
You are a much loved son, grandson, great-grandson, nephew and cousin.The whole family miss you so very much and hope and pray that you will be allowed to be part of our loving family again soon.
Children are being denied an entire family history, an entire family of relationships.
How will these children come to terms with the fact that they were prevented from discovering all these relationships, all too often they will resent those who have made the wrong choice and those who have enabled it.
Of course not all families have loving and caring relationships with one another, I am sure we can all think of some of our family members that we don’t really get on with, but to actually remove those people from a child’s life, unless there is a proven safe guarding issue, is cruel in the extreme.
Many, now adult children talk about how they feel cheated by those lost years, many of them were prevented from seeing grandparents who were terminally ill, and not allowed to say goodbye. They never forget the hurt and pain that caused them. A part of them died too.
As children grow older they all want to know more about their family, they may have been told untruths about us and told what terrible people we are, but they will want to find out for themselves.
Are we really the monsters they have been told we are?
When we started going thorough his devastating pandemic, we all witnessed the outpouring of compassion, communities all over the UK came together it felt that it had taken a disaster for us to all pull together, and I honestly believed that we would all come out of it better people, and yet if anything it seems to have done the opposite.
People seem to be more aggressive than ever, be that in driving or waiting in a queue, it just feels like living in a tinderbox.
Society feels as though it has become one of extremes.
There is no middle ground anymore, you either believe in what I say or you are wrong!
A pendulum swings, it is the nature of a pendulum that it swings left and right, I don’t mean in a political sense, it takes a very long time for a pendulum to just sit in the middle and so we have one extreme to another.
If we look at equality in all its forms gender, race, culture etc how can this ever be achieved if one side is saying the other side are all bad and all wrong?
That middle ground has to be found, if we constantly tug one way or the other the issues we are raising become an issue in themselves.
Society is on a precipice we have to all change our way of thinking, we have to normalise all our differences, respect others points of view, learn by them not disregard them.
We must value all family relationships, warts and all, without family the building blocks of a better world will remain out of reach.
Each and every individual has a duty to look to themselves, to question their actions for the sake of future generations.
