In my Quebec which is both at half-mast and on strike, I get up all week to “not” go drive the children to school, forced, like thousands of parents, to reinvent my professional life again in shutdown mode. schools. My solidarity remains complete, while I cross the first strike picket, and with my daughter, we put The demonstration loudly in the car, windows rolled down in the “cold rain of” November, here, to support them. The demonstrators smile, brandishing their signs and their thermos of steaming coffee.
I try to find the words to explain to him why they are there, what they are demanding from their bosses, from the government. She, who is currently shaping her understanding of the world, developing her critical sense and ethics, crying at each itinerant she encounters and deconstructing, above all, my defense mechanisms with basic philosophical questions, still wants answers. We will have to remember that these children are the same (and that we are therefore also the same parents) as those who survived the pandemic waves. And that daily life for them does not have the same reassuring continuity as it may have had for us at the time when school closures were only considered during major snow or ice storms.
Distinguish the motives behind phenomena which, apparently, have the same effects on them (following mom to the office, being looked after by the neighbors, spending a lot of time in front of screens while teleworking, or even playing Playmobil in classrooms). ‘waiting) becomes our way of going beyond primary pragmatism to discuss with them the world in which we live, its inconsistencies, its cruelty, its invitations to do better, above all.
We know that finding the words to explain the fundamentals to children forces us to go back there ourselves. Words quickly become hollow if we do not open them to the deep substance they contain, that which tries to be expressed in this managerial, utilitarian and operational language which seems to be the only one admitted, heard and relayed in the ambient discourse. Not only are children excellent philosophers, but I would add that some are also excellent phenomenologists, constantly revealing the inapparent in exchanges. In a way, they already know how to read the invisible under the demands of network workers better than we do. They have already felt the fatigue of their teacher, the heavy task that falls to her of teaching them all, with all the challenges that invite themselves into their class. My daughter knows that the doctors certainly saved my life, but that the “madam from the hospital cafeteria” also saved my soul, more than once, with her frank smile, her look that had the time to take the time, to consider myself as a whole human being. Children are sensitive to authentic presence, to floating data that filters through our non-verbal, our fatigue and our intentionality.
We will therefore talk little about salaries and working conditions, even if we will explain them briefly. But, quickly, we will be able to name the essentials, those that we find packed in rows of courage, on our street corners, in front of the CHSLD, the school, the CEGEP.
In our little four-handed dissertation that morning, the time it takes to go to the office together, my daughter and I, we will manage to talk about the loss of meaning for the workers of these networks who, day after day, make gestures whose meaning they end up seeking, in structures which increasingly obstruct their impulse to care, to educate, to love – because it is always a gesture of love which is hidden behind a career in public networks. We will address the big question of ethical suffering, which refers to this gap between what we are asked to do, to respect these regulations – which serve the institution more than the people who are received there and who work there – and what that we feel, deep down, is what we should do.
Yes, we got there by taking the detour which consisted of thinking about what leads us to choose one job more than another, to favor the one which gives us this feeling of vibrating from the inside, which makes us want to get up, even on days when we are less tempted to get up. We talked about the need to preserve this little magic that works in us, sometimes even without our intervention, as if it moved us, revealed to us both who we were and what we were gifted to bring into our lives. the world. She told me “it’s like you, if you couldn’t write or if you were told what to write about and what to say in your columns”. “Yes, it’s like I can’t write.” In fact, I added: “It’s also like when I couldn’t see children in play therapy when I worked in schools because I was told that that wasn’t my job, and that I had to work faster with each child, because there were plenty of them who needed help. » We call this interference in “professional autonomy”.
Beautiful big words that sometimes end up emptied of their meaning, but not in the car that morning. Like a string of pearls placed just one after the other, her thoughts followed their path, as she realized what these workers meant to all of us. Going from her teachers to the doctors who took care of her mother, to those who take care of the elderly at the neighboring CHSLD, she gradually understood that these people on the sidewalks represented nothing less than the whole of what carries us, elevates us, cares for us. The institution as it was thought by Paul Ricoeur, ethics, place of mediation of our commitment towards the other, towards ourselves, towards the world, had just been thought of in a car cabin, and all the hopes on the following the world were allowed to me again.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.