When I gave birth to my first child, in 2019, it seemed that everything that could potentially be wrong was wrong. He turned out to be white and lame, his head walking towards the side. People entered the hospital room, trying to sue their lungs so they could breathe. Hours later, my husband and my husband stood at the NICU, watching this newborn baby, sticking to wires and tubes.
We spent several months talking about how to protect it from various harmful effects, and we were an hour from the gate here to deal with the situation we did not consider. Did his brain lose oxygen for a long time? Will there be a lifetime loss?
At the hospital that night, I learned the parents’ first lesson: You are not in control of what is going to happen, nor can you predict it. This applies to your child’s personality, many choices and to some extent his health. It also applies to the increasing risk of climate change.
The climate crisis is deteriorating and deteriorating. Here in Oregon, we have endured severe heat waves and forest fires in recent years. As a mixture of effects, it is clear that many people around the world – many of whom are suffering and dying.
Globally, One of the three children Fatal heat waves are encountered, and even more unclean water. One study estimates that forest fire smoke is 10 times higher, which is harmful as common pollution for children’s developing lungs. Researchers also concluded that almost every child in the world is at least risking at least one climate -related risk: severe heat, severe storms and floods, forest fires, food insecurity and pests. Diseases.
If you are a person like me who has children and are awakened for your future, you should not let despair about climate change. In fact, I will argue that bravery is now to be done – even hopeful to give up with hope.
“When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic,” Vietnamese Buddhist monk and author Thach Net Hanh, who passed away in 2022, wrote in his book “Every step” in his book “Peace is every step” – “Since we are in our hope in the future, we do not pay attention to our energies and abilities at the present moment.”
Looks like a parent without hope? To me, it is living with the knowledge that my two children will face the challenges I can’t even imagine. It is sad that I cannot give the life of which I wish for them. By joining local climate worker groups and stopping their air travel, they are choosing to do this.
I do not do this because I think I can magically save my children from the climate crisis, but because I am fully aware that I cannot do so. But most of all, it is accepting that I do not know, nor control everything that happens to my children.
I often think of the author Emily Rap Black, whose son Ronon died of a tie -sex disease just before his third birthday. He wrote in 2013, “The parents of a child without the future have taught me: nothing is forever.” Article. “Just now, the moment you love, the knowledge that is about to love to love, and that the power of a person’s grief is a reflection of the depth of their love.”
Identifying instability is the whole game. To love, lose and love and lose something else. This is the only way I know that parents’ method. This is the only way I know to be alive.
Last month, when the fire destroyed huge parts of Los Angeles, I was in Oregon in the park with my father and my two young children, and was pushing them to the swings.
Later, while we were walking home from the park, my father told me that when he and my mother first met, he was afraid to have a baby. It was the 1980s, and he believed that the world was moving towards a nuclear war. He told me, “I couldn’t even imagine exposing my children in front of him.
“What changed?” I asked him.
“I realized that it was arrogant,” he said. “To think that I can see in the future and decide that life should not increase my past.”
We kept going. In the afternoon, the sun brightened everything in the golden color. At the distance my baby: two small bobing hats. Their whole future, unknown to me. Out of my control
I thought about everything that my father would have saved from me: loneliness and loss and failure and a body full of microplastics. A world that is both underwater and fire. Also, friendship and pizza and laugh until I take my breath. Holding my children for the first time. At that moment, here in the park, walking with his father. That can be so wrong. I am really afraid what is coming. But I will not remember it for the world.
I said, “I’m glad you changed your view.”
“Yes, me too,” he said.
