My Mother and I Finally See Eye-to-Eye

Yes, the mother-daughter relationship is by its very nature complex. While I adore my own mother, she does often vex and challenge me. My fear and torment over whether or not to become a mother myself always confused her. During graduate school I called her often, usually when I was walking to my next engagement. Being steeped in the global tragedy of climate change at a deeply thorough, academic level really shook me to my core.

“What kind of future are we building here?” I’d cry to my mum. “Everything aspect of our society is unsustainable and I can’t possibly fix anything by myself.” At that point in time, I didn’t know whether or not Jack and I would wed. We’d been apart for months and the idea of child-rearing was still just an intellectual exercise, but one that weighed me down the more I thought about our planetary peril.

“Your time will come. I know you’re scared, but you’ll know which decision is right for you when you reach that bridge. Heck, I waited until the Gulf War was over before we conceived you. I understand.”

“But you really don’t, mom. Foreign wars have next to no impact on day-to-day domestic affairs in the U.S. You weren’t in any real danger back then and neither was I. Global warming is different. War and peace can be waged and forged with political will. Meanwhile, there’s no political will to cut our carbon emissions. We’re killing our future-children today, right now, by refusing to decarbonize our energy infrastructure.”

She’d argue back, change the subject, or fall silent. This went on for months. We’d repeat the conversation just for the fact that I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t think or speak of anything else. If I couldn’t convince my own parents to vote for policies that will slow down and mitigate our own hastening doom, how could I convince anyone else in my life to take the threat seriously? Just as I’ve written before, parents want what’s best for their children, but more than that they want grandchildren. Once you reach a certain age, to produce anything less than a human child is to be viewed as less-than.

These phone calls took place back in 2018-2019. Just a few weeks ago, in mid-October 2021, my mother became the first family member to stay in our new house. We went sight-seeing and window-shopping, we ate delicious food, and we introduced her to our Trinity County friends. Overall, it was an excellent visit.

One night, over our second bottle of wine, my mother turned to me and said, “I finally understand why you don’t want children.”

I balked. “Well, I WANT kids, mom. But I don’t want them to starve to death. I don’t want us to run out of water where we live.”

She laid her hand on my arm. “Let me rephrase. I finally understand why you’re so hesitant to have children.”

“You do?” I asked skeptically.

“Yeah. I can feel it now. Everything is different. It’s tangible. Even I can’t ignore it. Massachusetts never used to get tornadoes and hurricanes and now we need to brace for them regularly. I hate snow, but that’s not why we’re getting less and less of it. Society is restless, hostile. It’s a dangerous time to be alive, just as it always has been, but I can feel it getting worse.”

I gaped in disbelief. At long last we were on the same page. I felt seen. I felt heard. I felt like I wasn’t crazy, wasn’t being shamed for the war between my heart and my brain, which only grows louder the older I get and the closer I creep to the end of my reproductive window.

I cried. As I so often do. “Then what do I do, mom? I’m doing everything I can and it’s only going to get worse.”

“Only you know the answer to that, Megan. I, for one, think that you would make a lovely mother some day. But I understand now why you might choose to live out your life with Jack without any kids to care for. I spend every waking minute worrying about my daughters even though they’re grown. To know what you know, to carry a burden that heavy, will undoubtedly strain your mind and your nervous system to its breaking point.”

Damn, mom. “I’ll feel selfish if I have kids.”

“But you will act selflessly once they’re born.”

“What if they hate me for bringing them into a collapsing world filled with death?”

“Even if Earth were perfectly stable and prosperous, you would always run the risk of having your children resent you. For whatever reason. Could be any reason at all. We all take that risk when we choose to bring a new family member into the world. Some families become alienated and estranged due to poor individual choices, some fall apart due to addiction and mental illness, some can’t even function on a basic level. The best you can do is work as a team with Jack to create a supportive, loving home. And I know you two are more than up to the task. I don’t think your fate is to be hated by your own sons or daughters.”

Ah, the platitudes we cling to in our darkest days. I wanted her to be right, still want her to be right. Everyone is moving forward with their lives as if the world as we know it isn’t literally ending. Babies everywhere. Babies galore. I barely scroll on Facebook anymore because it’s flooded with images of children I’ll most likely never meet. To be clear, I like seeing family portraits where my friends are presenting their newest family members. But so many photos are just of their children alone, and I feel weird looking at it because I come to Facebook to consume content generated by my adult friends and peers, not to consume images of children (yikes). The next chapter is beginning for so many people, the human population continues to boom, and all of it comes at the expense of the biodiversity upon which we depend for our own existence. Our happiness and comfort today will bring much suffering to those recently born before they even reach my present age (29).

And there are no answers.

I certainly have no answers.

People are going to bareback fuck until the end of time, regardless of whether or not they make decent parent material. What’s the harm, really, in gestating and birthing two more humans? Jack and I would work tirelessly to provide a happy life to our next generation. Isn’t that a good enough reason to take the plunge? But of course, multiply that thinking by a billion and here we all are. Too many mouths to feed, not enough land to grow food.

I am not a good writer. I’ve never claimed to be. I am “a writer” merely for the fact that I try to write regularly in the hopes that repetition will one day lead to true, masterful artistic expression. I don’t think hardly anyone reads these posts, and I don’t think they’re particularly interesting to anyone except me and a few select people, perhaps other young women fighting the same internal battle between mothering and not-mothering.

I don’t have enough life experience to offer wisdom, and I don’t have the talent to move people toward combatting global warming on a mass scale. All I have is this blog as a form of catharsis. But, for the first time since writing it, I can say that my mother is on my side. She sees the world through my eyes, sees the grimness of the future, and through all of it is still supportive of me and whatever decisions I might make.

The yearning for motherhood grows stronger all the time, despite myself. I can’t write a single one of these posts without crying through the entirety of my typing. I would love nothing more than to present a newborn baby to my own mother, so that she might hold him or her and say, “My baby has a baby.”

And until that day arrives, all I can afford to repeat to myself is, “You’ve got time. You’ve got time.”