With Love. From Mum.

For anyone paying attention to the state of our world today, hope often feels alien and unattainable. Climate despair, crushing power imbalances driven by insatiable greed, weakening global guard rails, the very questioning of the right to human rights. It feels that no matter where you turn, logic has simply left the building and that with it humanity is careening towards our inevitable doom. 

In the face of all this, I made the choice to become a mother. 

In a world that feels like it’s on fire, choosing to have children feels like the ultimate expression of hope. Unlike previous generations it is now an active decision and not the inevitable conclusion to one of humanities favourite past times. 

It is not a decision I made lightly, and if I’m honest it is not a decision I made confidently. I question it when I read the news. I question it when I wake to smoke carpeting our lives from forest fires across the country. I question it when I see so many fellow humans settle into hateful rhetoric without questioning why the powerful few want to sew distraction and empty division. I question it when I think about the fact that the world’s 12 richest people collectively hold more wealth than 4.1 billion people on the other end of the spectrum. 

In a world that feels like it’s on fire, choosing to have children feels like the ultimate expression of hope.

Motherhood rips you apart in ways you never expected and then it rebuilds you in ways you didn’t know were possible. It is this beautiful, complicated, lived contradiction. Becoming a mother is a brutal, difficult, and often dangerous act, a fact that our patriarchal society chooses largely to ignore (along with most women specific health concerns). Also, congratulations a large part of your heart and soul now lives permanently outside of your chest. 

It’s almost a wonder that anyone could still want to take the risk. Yet, want it, we do. Some of us yearn for children with every fibre of our being. Some of us are more hesitant. Some come to it without much thought and some spend a life’s fortune, or many bitter tears to bring our hope into into the world. Either way I can’t help but feel that every single child born into this place and time is the embodiment of hope. That taking the plunge into parenting in our modern world can’t help but be a defiant act of hope. 

I hope so much for my children. I hope with my whole being. 

I hope for them when I stand in the stillness of a forest. I hope for them, lost in the colours of an unexpectedly beautiful sunset. I hope for them when I hear their laughter, or see their eyes light up with joy. I hope for them in their excitement and in their disappointment. I see hope for them in the beautiful mathematics of our universe. I see it in the pure majesty of our natural world. I see it in the kindness of strangers and the hearts of my nearest and dearest. 

I believe that humanity can choose the right path. I believe we can pull our heads out of our collective asses and put them together to build a better future for our children. Because let’s be honest if we don’t start imagining better reality to work towards we’re all just complacently slipping into one of the many apocalyptic narratives that have long been shoved down our throats.

And so here it is. One mother screaming into the void, driven by hope. Begging you to find your own hope. Putting pen to paper in the only way I can think of to take action. To add my spark to the flame I so desperately hope is igniting in our world. 

Hoping we can start asking the questions that matter. Start imagining and hoping that together we can find the starting point. 

With love,

-A Mother