Pieces

There are more “children” in my household than one might originally appreciate. Although tax documents and other government forms list us as a family of four, along with my daughter and son there is also Dinah, Juja, Mern, Samantha-Baby and a host of other dolls and critters coated in various degrees of fur and hair, tails, ears and whiskers.

The menagerie, human and otherwise, are cared for daily by my four year-old daughter who was born a mother. As I struggled my own way into motherhood, she toddled around with a doll in the crook of her arm, cooing and caressing, pausing occasionally to press the baby’s face to her chest for a feeding.

As she has grown, her parenting style has matured. These days, she carefully carries her crew down the stairs each morning, substantial progress from the old method in which she flung the charges down one at a time and watched as they bumped from step to step. The babies are now rarely dragged nude into the winter woods for an adventure and it’s been a couple years since anyone spent the night stranded somewhere along the path, nestled into a bed of moss. Their clothes are changed regularly, their hair (if they have any) is brushed and my husband and I have to be careful to look before we sit on any piece of prime, comfortable furniture as someone is often carefully tucked in to sleep.

But what strikes me the most, as I watch my daughter mother, is the look on her face. It’s a mixture of adoration and wonder. She wears it most often when she watches her younger brother, whom she tends to like one of the little seedlings bravely facing the spring world in her garden bed. He’s the prize of her collection. She coddles and fusses over him, taking his dimpled hand to usher him along, “Here, little buddy, follow me.”

Recently, she informed me that she will have her first real baby when she is 33. She wants to be an astronaut and the President of the United States, so she’s looking to get some career under her belt first. Having children is not a question in her mind. It’s a guarantee.

~

“Climate catastrophe” is a phrase that’s tossed around a lot these days, even more so since the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned, in 2018, that if we do not keep overall global warming close to 1.5°C, which means cutting global emissions 50% by 2030 and reaching net zero emissions by 2050, we face climate catastrophe within this century.

It’s pretty easy to speak in such general terms. It’s much harder to contemplate the specific actualities.

Climate catastrophe means a planet basically uninhabitable to human beings and most other species as well. This is a planet characterized by heat so extreme that human bodies cannot survive it, by droughts so intensive that large swaths of the planet become permanent food deserts, by flash flooding so rapid that parts of certain cities will disappear under water. Under these circumstances, it is anticipated that human civilization will collapse. We will not be able to withstand the pressure of that kind of mass suffering, the number of migrants, the starvation, the scarce resources, the disease.

But even this degree of specificity, while horrific, doesn’t land easily in my body. The numbers, the graphs, the many, many projections tumble around each other in my mind as I sit at my desk each day, researching, writing, organizing, and pursuing and trying to engage in solutions.

It’s not until I look at my children, at my daughter’s suddenly lanky frame skipping ahead into the woods, at my son and his soft baby skin toddling along after her, that it all finds a place deep in my heart. Ache is the only word for the feeling. An ache so profound, so bottomless, that it scares me. Their dreams and their future will play out alongside that potential of catastrophic collapse. All of those specifics could be their specifics.

Sometimes ache is the best alarm bell. Sometimes love is the only compass we possess.

~

They walk together, hand-in-hand, two small bodies between tall trees. They walk together, standing so straight, with determined, deliberate steps. They walk together, and they are not afraid.

I stand still. My feet plant on the earth while my heart rises to my throat and tears prick at the back of my eyes.

That these moments still catch me by surprise is something of a miracle. I should know better. I should know by now what it is like to love this way, in this time.

Their boldness takes my breath away. Both with tiny, soft hands and one still with the sagging pants that tell of diapers and cradles, and yet they stride into the forest, into the world, ready to meet whatever exists around the bend. Which really is just more pine trees and maybe a few chattering squirrels but what steals my oxygen isn’t the possibilities in the woods today. It’s the wider, incomprehensible but entirely existent truth.

It’s their leaving. It’s my staying. It’s that we could ever exist independent of each other. It’s the world, the tumbling, the breaking apart, the crumbling of everything familiar, of how we thought it would be. And they are destined for each other, these two pieces of my heart and that world. Together, they barrel towards a wild I cannot imagine.

I want to push back at the facts. I want to say, “It isn’t so.” I want to nestle into the spaciousness of their dreams, shutting out all threats of other possibilities.

But I don’t. I wander and wonder alongside them both and then, as they sleep, I read the reports and organize with other concerned citizens of this planet and that future. I stare the beast full in the face and meet the fear with action and solutions, knowing my work is one small piece, but that, for me, it is the only path forward on which I can walk, head up, heart still present to the joy of each new discovery my children make every day.

After my love, the greatest gift I can give them is to not pretend it is otherwise.