Holding My Child at the End of the World

I lay in bed with my toddler at the end of the world.. at least in my anxiety-riddled imagination.

Our windows flash with nonstop lightning, the sky gods dump bucketfuls of water on our roof, and the wind whips at what my weather app informs me are 80mph gusts. My toddler is in our bed because she’s scared. My job is to be the parent and tell her everything is okay. I hold her close, her hands repeatedly guiding my hands to cover her ears from the noise of rain, thunder, and wind. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” I murmur to her.

But I am scared. And I don’t believe it’s okay. Not so much because of the storm itself, but because of what it represents to me.

We live in Ohio, one of those places more shielded than most from the extreme weather patterns climate change causes. But even here, the obvious fact that summers are becoming increasingly hotter is unavoidable. This week has been extra hot and humid, setting the stage for pop-up storms like this one.

Holding my daughter, I think about hurricanes along coastal states, I think of out-of-control wildfires in Western states. I think of famine in Africa. I think of melting glaciers. I think of a planet slowly growing hotter where each summer we are breaking temperature records and we experience on our own skin what climate change feels like. It’s no longer abstract.

How can I pretend to her like things are okay?

She seems to sense the fear I don’t say out loud and whimpers, grabbing my hands more tightly to cover her ears. Just pretend. Just pretend, I tell myself. Everything might be okay.

If climate change weren’t enough of an existential threat, I worry additionally about our country — the empire of America — as we seem to be chaotically descending into madness. I worry about authoritarianism. I worry about the imposition of theocracy, or one might even say Christo-fascism, on our governing system. I worry about civil war. I worry about living in a state that believes a single-cell organism in a uterus has more value than the uterus-haver or even the born child itself. I worry about a lot of things.

The once-unconquerable Roman empire fell. Every empire in history eventually reaches its demise. Our country has no reason to be different. But did it have to be on my time?

Do I apologize to my child for bringing her into the world? The thought breaks my heart. What sort of future are she and my son heading towards?

But, as Ezra Klein says in an article on climate change, “to bring a child into this world has always been an act of hope.”

Klein points out that our human history is riddled with hardship and loss, and how much our quality of life (health, safety) has improved. The Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60% of Europe’s population. Families once had children in anticipation of a quarter of them dying in infancy and half dying before adolescence. The human race has endured so much hardship over time. We have come so far — it should drive us to action that we risk losing the incredible gains we’ve made over centuries and millennia of existence.

Mother Nature has no need for us to survive. She exists whether we do or not.

But we do need us to survive. I am always struck by the insistence of humans to go on living even when life is so, so hard. I have to believe that we are smart enough, clever enough, determined enough to find some way through this. I hope our selfishness will not be the last word, but that our better angels will show up to have their voices heard.

Perhaps part of my existential anxiety is that since I was a child, I was raised to believe the end of the world was imminent. In our belief system, the Rapture was on its way with the apocalypse close behind. The United States was basically Israel, the hero of the story, and the antichrist was going to rise up out of Russia (the irony of Trump and the far religious right now being in bed with Russia is not lost on me).

When you grow up convinced that you might not make it to adulthood because you could be raptured at any moment, maybe it’s harder to shake that unconscious mindset than you thought. Maybe it takes a long, long time for existential dread to seep out of your bones.

When I am not consumed by worrying about how everything is falling apart, I can see beauty in places. I witness my daughter’s vivid imagination, her every perfect feature. I hear my son’s anticipatory laughter as he watches tickling fingers approach his belly. I imagine them at 6 and 4, or 12 and 10. I can’t imagine much further into the future. I drink in the moments of soft skin, fierce snuggles, peaceful breathing. These moments are so visceral, so real.

I can’t say I pray much anymore. I used to — for things that felt much more tangible than what I want now. I used to ask about specific situations and people. Now, if I pray, what do I say? Please … help … all of this. I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t even know what we need. But please don’t abandon us all to our own devices. Please be here with us in this mess of all that exists. Bring us some hope?

And God, whoever they are, has seen it all before. There is nothing new under the sun. Worlds have fallen before and will fall again. Our world may fall — it may not. But at the end of our life, we die. You don’t leave life any other way. All the worrying, yet the same result.

If my worry plunges me into despair, it makes the life I have not worth living. Despair is the place I must not go, even when it beckons. Hope makes life worth living. Presence to what is right in front of me brings hope. I can create a life worth living by choosing to lean into hope and actively looking for what is good and lovely.

I am also able to observe that between the several days of starting this article and finishing it, my existential anxiety has calmed down. The world did not change, and my life did not change. But I rode the wave of anxiety and I’ve landed again in a place where it feels less overwhelming. Life continues to unfold in ordinary ways: waking up, caring for babies, grocery shopping, going to work.

My NARM trauma training tells me that even when I can’t change my circumstances, I can change how I relate to them. Do I see myself as a helpless victim, or do I see myself as someone who can do something — even when that something is as small as refusing to allow someone else to steal my own sense of dignity and humanity?

I can still hold on to some sense of agency even in the worst of circumstances. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, made meaning out of the most hopeless of places. If he can do that, perhaps I can do something too.

I would like to be aware of my anxiety and the threats that provoke it, but I do not want to be consumed by it. I want to be able to find joy and meaning even at the end of the world… or the end of a world.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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