Celestial insurance

Hermaphrodite Mum

Three kids and a single mum

Middle child has been doing some deep thinking about God recently. He is at a point in his life where he needs God, like a security blanket. The world is becoming a scary place. People die and don't come back. Whereas Quiet One takes a more flippant approach ("You die, so what?"), he is looking for an insurance policy. At bedtime, he asked if I could send him a message - when I died - to reassure him that heaven did exist. I promised, if I had the good fortune to end up in heaven, I would do my best to get in touch.

'Is there a heaven, Mummy?'

Earlier this week the novelist Margaret Atwood, in an interview on Radio 4, alluded to our spiritual need to understand where we come from. While discussing the "Crakers", a race of genetically engineered humans in her MaddAddam trilogy, she observed:

"They are also doing what children do once the discover the past tense and the future tense - so they have to have, 'Where did we come from' and that results in a theology."