tipping point.

I was editing a photo session, an hour I spent this week with a gorgeous little girl in her home, looking at the photos of her playing with her mummy and smiling and giggling and showing me her toys. Every so often I was checking twitter, as I do on most work days, to see what was happening in my small corner of the internet and to share amusing links to articles about boobs or let the world know that I spent my morning photoshopping dog genitals out of a wedding album, when I saw this tweet from Gaby Hinsliff. At first I skimmed by it, tried really hard to ignore it. God, I wanted to ignore it. Who wants to read things that they know are going to break their hearts? So I went back to my photo session, back to images of a happy, safe toddler wrapped in the arms of her mother. But then I was back on twitter, my finger hovered over the #tippingpoint hashtag and after a few seconds I clicked. At first I read one blog post; not too graphic, not too distressing, just facts, a call to Do Something.  'okay,' I thought, 'I've done my bit, I can go back to work now', but a few minutes later and I was back and I was reading through the posts as fast as I could, one after another until finally this one broke me, forced me to feel what I had been avoiding since I first caught a glimpse of a headline three days ago. 

Describing the evils of massacre in detail is beyond me. I'm still resisting engaging with this as a mother, imagining that it could have been my babies. I don't have the words to pull at your heartstrings, to make you feel the revulsion and the pain and the despair of the situation. All I ask is that if like me, you were avoiding engaging with the horror of the Houla massacre, you consider letting yourself feel, consider reading about what happened and doing something, however small, to voice your anger that things like this happen in our world. 

Todayt, June 1st, bloggers have united in protest. People are tweeting with the hashtag #tippingpoint and the Times have made their article on the massacre free to view today. There are things you can do too...

• You can sign petitions from Save The Children, Avaaz and Amnesty.
• You can blog about it, tweet about it or share the things you read on Facebook.
• You can RT tweets you see that use the hashtags #tippingpoint #syria #stopthekilling
• You can read more about the politics and facts known about the massacre in Houla, Syria here.
• On June 10th You can join the protest of mothers, parents, grandparents and children in London