On the way the light hits
CW: pregnancy.
The universe shrinks down to your belly. You think of microscopic cells forming, copying a blueprint sketched on DNA 40,000 times finer than a human hair. You think of tiny fingernails, eyelashes, the shell of a china doll ear. You lie in bed at night and stare down at the surface of your skin, searching for tremors, evidence she’s really there. In the park you notice the angle of the sun in the early autumn trees. You picture how her fingers will curl around your finger, sharing your favourite poem. we are drifting back and forth / between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles. You are building a world closer than your own skin.
Yet becoming a parent links you to something colossal, bigger than history. Think of a time when no one will remember your name. “The future is dark,” Virginia Woolf wrote in the brutality of the First World War, “which is the best thing it can be, I think”. Imagining the time ahead as a climate ‘apocalypse’, surveys say, many people are choosing not to become parents at all; others who have live to regret it. “I don’t want to birth children into a dying world,” one respondent said, “though I dearly want to be a mother.”
An act of callousness, then? You know your motives are selfish, that you have a fear, as an only child, of biological loneliness; that you have never quite shaken off the tales they told you - that doing this will make you complete. You want to look at a face, a life, in the future, and see yourself reflected there.
But you cannot give up on the idea that it might also be an act of hope. Maybe it is your historical privilege – of being born into a time and place and life of relative peace and prosperity – that enables you to imagine your daughter singing in the dark times. It might be historical privilege, though, to imagine the opposite.
‘The climate and ecological emergency’. Yet the crisis is humanity’s; the fracturing of the unique relationship we have with the world. Whatever the future holds, how could it not also contain moments of joy, if there are people in it?
It will matter that she is here. It will matter that she bears witness to the daffodils arriving, that she hears birdsong. You hope that she will fight for it. One day she will have the breath knocked out of her by the way the light hits the leaves on an autumn morning. This is your wild, cosmological wager: that it will be worth it for that.