Manchester reminds all parents of the never-ending dread of losing a child | Gaby Hinsliff

Stumble downstairs, flick the kettle on, shout at the kids to hurry up and get dressed.

Morning routines will have unfurled in homes across Britain today much as always. And yet not quite. Children will have been hugged tighter than usual at the school gate, without understanding why. Parents will have foraged for football kit and mopped up spilt cereal feeling frankly grateful for the sheer ordinariness of it all. It is impossible not to think of all the parents whose children did not come home from Manchester Arena last night, and who would give anything now to be nagging them about their homework.

To love is to fear, and that’s what I never really grasped before parenthood. Each time the apron strings are loosened – first time leaving the baby with a sitter, first day at nursery or school, first time letting them walk to the corner shop on their own, first proper teenage night out without the grownups – is terrifying at first, until the next and still more terrifying rite of passage puts the last one into some kind of perspective.

Having children is one long process of daring yourself to let go, in which the instinct never to let them out of sight battles the knowledge that they need to make their own way into the world, even if the prospect of your baby being out there alone is terrifying. (They will always be your baby, even when they’re 50, with a hulking great overgrown baby of their own). But even so, the parents dropping their teenagers off at Monday’s Ariana Grande gig were surely worrying about underage booze and boys and losing each other in the crowd, not a bomb.

It went off in the foyer, just as parents were arriving to collect their kids and the crowd was pouring out. Nobody wants to imagine what happened next. But by breakfast the death toll stood at 22 with 59 injured, some surely in life-changing ways. Witnesses described seeing nuts and bolts littering the floor, suggesting a nail bomb designed to maximise the damage to small bodies, and the eyewitness accounts are awful: things you’d turn off the radio to avoid a child hearing. Yet children will have seen it happen in front of them.

Every death is a tragedy for someone, and every terrorist attack unspeakable. There is no hierarchy in grieving, no one sort of victim whose loss is worse than any other. But there is something so poignant about an attack on the softest of soft targets: a gig by a pop star whose fanbase is so very young. Seven-year-olds sing along to Ariana Grande in the car, or spend lunch breaks solemnly practising the dance routines in the playground. The arena will have been full of parents escorting kids too small to be allowed out on their own, plus older ones whose parents must have imagined they’d be safer with bubblegum pop than at a more grownup gig. The idea of children going through this alone is one of the hardest things to bear. Like a school shooting, it can only have been contrived to shock in the worst way possible.

The cowardice is despicable, the inhumanity breathtaking. What on earth goes through the mind of someone who could do this? Yet the sacrilege of it must be the point. The more blameless the victims, the more everyday the circumstances, the more we all see ourselves in it and the wider the impact.

The natural instinct is to hunker down at home and count your blessings, retreat into the domestic and familiar – which is one reason politicians have rightly suspended campaigning for a few days, to the palpable disappointment of those whose opportunism knows no bounds. As if anyone wants to see MPs sniping at each other about their manifesto costings right now, or fielding shouted questions about counter-terrorism strategy while posing for photo opportunities in Nuneaton nurseries.

We will be feeling the reverberations of this attack through politics for long enough. In the immediate aftermath, ministers are better employed in Cobra meetings, Manchester MPs in doing whatever they can to help their wounded city, and everyone else in taking a moment, while the facts are established, to reflect on what this means for national life.

Paris is built on cafe culture, which is what made the Bataclan shootings in November 2015 feel so directly aimed at what it means to be Parisian. But Manchester too is a city of gigs and music, and one that comes alive at night.

My parents moved to Manchester in the 1990s, the heyday of the Haçienda club, when I went to university. Some of the best nights of my life were spent back home in that city. It was always big enough to be exciting, but still just small enough to be intimate and friendly, somewhere you’d bump into people you knew in the queue for club, chips or cab. On Monday night it opened itself up to the stranded and traumatised exactly as I’d expect – drivers taking people home for free, people offering strangers shelter – and Manchester will surely put an arm around those affected for months to come.

It will overcome this, just as it overcame an IRA bombing two decades ago; I doubt this atrocity will change the city half as much as its perpetrators hope. Even at the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles, Belfast still had a nightlife, albeit one circumscribed by complex rules and security constraints that clubbers in the rest of the UK never had to learn.

Nonetheless, a theoretical fear has now become real. We have been warned for some time that attacks on crowded public venues were likely, but Monday night adds a new and present danger to the list running through everyone’s mind. No matter what the fools peddling easy answers say, governments can only ever mitigate the risk, not eliminate it entirely – and while it’s one thing calculating whether to run risks for oneself, it’s hellishly more difficult trying to work out whether one’s children should be allowed to take them.

But none of that will stop our children wanting to spend Saturday afternoons roaming crowded shopping malls in giggly packs, as they have every right to do. They’ll still want to hop on and off the tube, go to Glastonbury and to big football matches, hang out at gigs and in pubs and clubs and on street corners without us. They’ll still be restless and unafraid, because the young always are, and those of us who are parents will still somehow have to find a balance between our fear and their freedom that doesn’t cramp emerging adulthood.

We’ll still be expected to wait in the car around the corner from the party, because we’re too embarrassing to be acknowledged in public. We’ll still lie awake until 2am listening for the key in the door, but pretend to be fast asleep when they eventually crash through it. To love is to fear, but learn not to show it. That, and to be grateful for every last mundane, ordinary moment.