Letter to my children
To mother (verb) – to care about the welfare of another person as much as one’s own which depends on empathy, thoughtfulness, noticing and caring.
I look at you and mourn.
Apple cheeked and pink-lipped, a wisp of hair falls over your eyes so you can barely see. I want to pin it back with a clip but you never let me, batting away my hand with a vigorous head shake and thunderous blue eyes.
I carry you everywhere, your father does too. An expensive pram idles in the hallway as you are scooped up, held tight, the smell of your bubble-gum shampoo, your soft cheek always within kissing distance and a hug that kneads the heart like dough.
I have become quite accomplished with this welcome and temporary disability. I can cook, make tea, pay bills, feed the dog and even plant a rose all with only one hand.
Sometimes, in brief moments of independence, you race into the garden under the cotton candy clouds and down the steep path between the tall meadow. You tumble onto the grass, kicking off your welly boots, often accompanied by Biscuit, a fat ginger tom cat. You look so free and happy and healthy and I want to weep. I must keep you safe but can I?
I’ve never let you cry in the night. Your father and I sleep light listening for the slightest sound. I hear a small sob and stumble through the dark house, capture you in my arms and hold you close, safe and warm, till daybreak.
My life is loss and gain. A vanished career, an absent friend, stiff from inertia, but instantly available whenever you need me. My reward is your cuddles and smiles.
Can I keep you safe? Your future is uncertain. Can I prepare you for that?
On the 8th October 2018, the International Panel for Climate Change published that report. Every degree of heating above 1.5 degrees will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat, poverty and loss of personal safety for hundreds of millions of people. But it’s happening now.
As I write this, Australia burns. Drought and poor land management have created the perfect environment for a furnace to engulf the country. Children forced into the sea. A half-drowned mother clutches them to the pillar of a pier, the sky smothered in a blood red haze. A small boy, his blonde hair pinned tight to his head by the elastic of a face mask, bobs about in a rowing boat, gazing back at the land whilst his home burns.
A woman, stripped to the waist, scoops up a burning Koala in her white shirt. She carries him to safety. He squeals in pain as she pours water on his wounds. Kangaroos and cattle are scorched to death, their charred bodies pinned up against a farmer’s fence, unable to escape the flames.
I am brokenhearted. What is a mother if she cannot keep her child safe? Mothers, those most motivated to protect their children, are the most powerless to do so.
In caring for you, my days are filled with food shopping and meal plans, grazed knees and board books. My mind atrophies at the tedium of it all but I accept my animal self, hormonally primed to keep you within grabbing distance, always.
I am not welcome in the world of big decisions, despite my expertise. The long hours and aggressive competitive tactics contrive to exclude me. By default they exclude you too. Rare is the mother of young children who walks the corridors of power, sits on the board of a fortune 500 company or runs a research centre.
My best efforts to keep you safe are not good enough. My best efforts are squeezed between school hours, arranging birthday parties and play dates. My best efforts idle behind cooking you a healthy meal or taking you to the doctor. My best efforts, I know, may come to nothing.
I imagine sometimes what I would like to do to keep you safe in this terrifying world we have created. I imagine an army of compassionate people fully informed of the risks who live freely enough to disrupt the fossil fuel economy. We would hijack the media and create urgent public awareness campaigns. We would redirect financial resources to upscaling renewable energy technologies and public transport and subsidise the insulation of people’s homes. We would influence government to regulate airlines and implement a frequent flier levy. We would plant a trillion trees. And we would support our farmers in becoming environmental champions - kings of carbon capture and curators of biodiversity.
The hardest work, I imagine, would be to create a world that is kinder, less competitive and more equal. Philanthropy and aid are not solutions for the worlds’ poorest but the symptoms of a broken global economy. My army and I would rage at the injustice of it all, driven forward in the knowledge that these things must be addressed to keep you safe.
We are at a cross-roads now. You have two futures and I am powerless to influence which finds you.
I dream that you will live in a beautiful city, designed to care for the planet and your well-being. Your city will have broad tree-lined avenues and urban allotments on every intersection. I see you on your bicycle, out of breath, calling back to your own children to keep up as you peddle though the safe car-free streets. I see buildings covered in greenery and the streets full of wildlife. Bees, heavy with pollen, bumble between apple trees that host Robins and Blue Tits and Sparrows. You are safe and happy.
Your work is important because it is for the benefit of others and you are important because you’re gentle, inquisitive and compassionate. You are content to have enough but not too much in the knowledge that too much pillages the planet’s resources. This is my dream for you.
I fight for your safety. I have no power or influence or army but still, I fight.
As you have grown older, some might call me a bad mother. I rush the school run and don’t linger with other parents. I forget to organise birthday parties and hurriedly book cinema tickets instead. I don’t play lego and I don’t sit with you to do homework. Sometimes, to my great shame, I shout at you as tiredness robs me of the creativity to cajole you into brushing your teeth or putting your school shoes on.
I have had to build walls to defend myself against despair but still, I fight.
I am forgoing our present for your future. I spend my days reaching out to others to build our army that will keep you safe. My failings as a mother are my gift to you. My failings are urgent and necessary and please, forgive me.
In life before you, I worked in Sub-Saharan Africa. I have seen the consequences of global heating. I held a deathly-sick baby, the mother distraught as she dripped a rehydration drink between her daughter’s cracked lips. She passed away soon after. The land is fast becoming uninhabitable. There is no water, no food and tribes, armed with AK-47s, battle over the few remaining livestock. Here is the canary in the coal mine. Humans battling over ever-diminishing resources is our fateful trajectory.
Our home in the UK has seen extreme heatwaves followed by devastating floods. No-one is immune to physics and as the planet heats under her carbon blanket, her systems that have gifted us the conditions to flourish, lurch unpredictably.
On the hottest day of the year in 2019 death rates rose by 400 people per day. The vulnerable among us – the elderly, immune-suppressed and children under five – cannot protect themselves. All were living in housing not designed for extreme heat. As London heats the concrete covered city will be populated with people panting in the shade, too hot to work or think. Perhaps we will be cowering inside under the panicked installation of an air-conditioning unit. Perhaps, like Dubai, we will even have a/c in our gardens, the energy demand spiralling our demise ever closer.
In the Hare and Hounds pub in Fishlake, Doncaster, the community huddled waiting for food and water that never came. Their homes were flooded with dirty river water and over-flowing sewerage, their possessions ruined, any sense of safety stolen. Residents of Whaley Bridge waited fretfully to see if the dam would burst washing their homes away forever. Bridges were swept away, rivers burst their bank and farmers lost their crops from too much or too little water.
I fight to keep you safe. I reach out to the impassioned to build our army to battle those that threaten your future.
The rumours from some public health research departments is that you may only live to fifty-five but specifics of age aside, you will lead a shorter, more difficult life. The fundamentals of survival that we take for granted, safe water, sufficient food and personal safety will all be undermined.
The rich may remain untouched, stock-piling resources, immune to the cries of the inflicted beyond their walls. The powerful continue to subsidise flights and expand airports. They raise the price of train travel and create policies that fuel consumerism with the deeply flawed belief that we need things more than we need each other. Possessions from a pillaged planet, that have killed all our wildlife, cut down our trees and poisoned our skies.
Do I fight for your army?
Or do I hunt down wealth and build walls to protect you?
Do I close my ears and heart to the rest of humanity, just to keep you safe?
