Dear child, who may or may not be born
8 January 2025, Portobello Beach, Edinburgh
You may never read this letter. We may never get to know each other, yet you’ve been on my mind. I’m sitting in a cafe on the promenade, front row for the sunrise. Around me, ocean blue and pastels, driftwood coloured floors and tables, people chattering or on their screens. Through the steamed-up windows, I see children run, zip, skip, waddle by, dragging their parents along or being dragged, late for school. They wear woollen hats topped with dinosaurs’ spikes and school bags that are outrageously colourful and oversized. I imagine what you’d wear, and how I’d feel, having to pummel playtime into clock time school run after school run.
Whenever I see a child, I wonder about you: who you’d be, how it would be, to be your mother. Sometimes on a Sunday morning, I’m glad I can’t hear your scuttling footsteps approaching in the hallway and that I can turn over in bed once more. Other times, like when I watched my startled niece marvel at her first snow, there’s a hollow ache for the experiences you and I may never have. Sitting here, writing, I feel heavy with the biggest decision I’m yet to make: whether you’ll exist, or not.
If you do, you could live well into the twenty-second century. What would your world be like, then? From here, a quarter into the previous one, I can’t imagine it, and part of me doesn’t want to. Outside, the sun stirs a softness on people’s faces. A pot of Lady Grey is brewing on my table. Last year, we quietly passed 1.5 degrees of global warming. The line that we said could not be crossed. Ten years ago I was in Paris for COP15. We wore red scarves and red lines on our cheeks, to say it’s enough, no further – tens of thousands of us in the streets. I struggle to look at these pictures now.
The eyes of the future are looking back at us,
and they are praying that we might see
beyond our own time.
These lines by Terry Tempest Williams often play in my head. I picture you, your piercing eyes, and the conversation in which you’d ask me: Why? Why did you let this happen? It’d be hard to explain what it’s like to live in this time. Most of what we do feels not enough and already too late. I’ve been wearing not-enoughness like a heavy coat for a long while now. Alongside others, I’ve been trying my best, to resist, to repair, and yes, I’ve let myself be distracted, too. I’ve tended, feasted, walked, danced, dug, sung, learned and loved with others. I’ve been furious at those in power. I’ve been repelled by all of us, too, how in our daily acts we diminish the world’s aliveness, even if we don’t intend to. From your present, you have all the right to ask why.
If you’re looking back at us, seeing what I’m seeing through this window, you may well think that people are just going about their days. I’m sure we all feel it though, the urgency, in our bodies. We’re afraid to talk about it, because that means we may need to start living as if it were true. Also, for many of us, the daily grind demands all we have. The system hasn’t made living easy. There is war and wildfires raging in many places, there is scraping by. I’ve been mostly sheltered from this so far. Yet, my generation is the first to weigh up parenthood against the likelihood of climate collapse in our lifetime. What kind of choice is that? Is giving life to a child hopeful or reckless? People have always started families, I tell myself, even in rugged times. ‘What you people call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee’, Vinay Gupta famously said. Beside me the coffee press is roaring.
The newspaper headlines this morning read: ‘Ironic’: climate-driven sea level rise will overwhelm major oil ports, study shows’. Sea rise predictions say Portobello prom will disappear later this century. Most people don’t want to make a fuss about it, because their house prices may plummet. Many nights, I’ve been dreaming of water, of floods, of high waves. In one dream, I opened the backdoor of a stone cottage and found murky water up to the doorstep. The friends I was with were eager to plunge in, but I hesitated, afraid of the cold and the deep. I can’t remember what happened, but in the next scene I was watching two toddlers playing in the flood water, laughing, splashing each other’s chubby bodies, and delighting. Like kids do.
Would you want to be alive? Would you take it in your stride, no matter how deep your daily struggle may be? Would you find joy in the cracks? I know I have, and continue to, and so much care and connection. Is it my place to protect you, before you can choose? Also, I want to keep alive in me the hope that the future could be, will be, livable. What else is there?
This may sound strange but I’m still finding out what I’m here to do and what it takes to be me. In the midst of this, I wonder if I’d struggle being dedicated to you becoming you. Or could we figure it out alongside each other? If you were born, I’d want you to arrive in a home that feels like a sturdy ship, headed for the sea with all sails out. A community where we cherish life, a place where you can thrive in the changing currents and tides. Lynn Ungar wrote in her poem ‘Ritual of Safe Passage’:
There is no time when you are ready,
no point at which you say “Ah, today
the world and I are fit for a child.”
That may be true. But even if I shouldn’t wait for the world to be ready, for a community home to be built, I can still choose not to become your mother (though my body may choose for me, too). There are countless people around me that could do with my care, there are projects and places to steward, children I can be an auntie to. I swing between seeing parenting as an unseemly selfish choice in a time of so much need, and as a radical – and deeply demanding – act of selflessness.
I know we’d try our best, your could-be dad and I: To be deeply committed to you and each other, even as we’d stumble out of bed at 2am for the eleventh time, or find you glare at us from beneath a thick fortress of teenage hair. But oh, the pitfall of ‘Project Perfectly Earthy Family’. The strain it would put on us, to raise you ‘the right way.’ Just when I’m trying to take off this Coat of Not-Enoughness. My chest tightens with the responsibility of bringing you up in this baffling time. Bigger and more serious than anything I’ve ever done up till now: The things I’d want to shelter you from, the things I’d need to explain to you…
Right now, I love that I can go out and write in the morning before work, like I did today. I need solitude, my own pace and rhythm. I need the web of relationships around me, and to tend it. My hands – holding this pen now – would be making you food, wiping your butt, holding your hand, tucking you in, zipping you up, waving you off, again and again. Part of me would never stop worrying about you. When I wandered along the shoreline earlier, I watched two young, peeping seagulls hankering after their mum in the waves. Does she ever want to be left alone, I wondered. Or is it true that once you ‘have’ a child, every cell in your being reconfigures towards them? Like a guillemot becomes all about her egg as she hovers on the ledge of the cliffs, brooding, Would I still recognise myself?
Once your tiny body was lying on mine, and I was feeling your breath tickling like a feather, I’m sure I’d soon be unable to imagine not knowing you. You would become one of the most important people in my life. Yet, right now you’re a stranger. Right now, I can still choose to break the chain of mothers at my back. I could snip the bloodline. I could forge a path less expected of me as a woman, less advertised, less ‘ready-made’. I could choose to pass the gifts and stories I carry to those around me, the way the roots of a tree go wide as well as down. I could go on to weave other kinds of kin, if I wanted.
The pink and gold of the sunrise has paled outside. I’ve been here for a while now, the waiter came to ask if I wanted anything else, and I said I’m fine. I know there’ll be grief in the life I won’t choose, with or without you, and there’ll be learning. I know I’ll be ok anyway, and you will too, with or without me. Lynn Ungar reminds me:
There is enough love.
There will always be enough love.
I wonder what will happen. With curiosity and love,
Olga
-
The quote by Terry Tempest Williams is from Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (Vintage, 2002)
“Ritual of Safe Passage” by Lynn Ungar is from Bread and Other Miracles (AuthorHouse, 2012)
Olga Bloemen is a budding writer based in Edinburgh. Originally from The Netherlands, she's been living in Scotland for almost half her life. Her work was shortlisted for the Patricia Eschen Price for Poetry in 2022 and has been published by Dark Mountain and Paperboats. As a facilitator, trainer and mediator, she supports movements for social and climate justice. She tends to agree with Mary Oliver: “There is only one question: How to love this world.”