How Baby

(Sad post ahead.)

Hopefully, by the time this post goes up, the smoke will have cleared up a little, but as of drawing this: my province is on fire, and the smoke is so thick that we’ve taken to wearing masks outdoors. I haven’t seen the actual sun in days, just a hellish red disc haunting a spoiled-milk sky.

I kept up with them for a while, but it seems like every news outlet is getting on the ‘talking about extreme weather’ bandwagon, and all of my media consumption is choked with articles about climate change and year-long fire seasons and hundreds-of-consecutive-hottest-months-on-record and how we’re all super fucked forever if we don’t act NOW NOW NOW and it’s. It’s. It’s not doing great things to my mental health, you know?

It’d be different if there was something I could do, but the impact of individual people on climate change is so small compared to what needs to happen at the national and global level for things to get back on course. Some days, it feels like it’s all I can do to put on a brave face for Momo while I feel like screaming and crying because systems put in place long before I was born are going to drastically impact my daughter’s future, and I’m trapped in this horrible limbo of arriving what feels like far too late to promise her a good life.

I hate it. I hate seeing her sweet little face with indents and irritation from the rubber straps of the mask. I hate trying to come up with fun, nonthreatening ways to make her wear it when the other kids say she looks funny. I hate thinking that these are her summers now, that catastrophic forest fires are going to be a yearly occurrence. I hate the intrusive thoughts, that I have with extreme guilt, that maybe it would have been better if we never had children, so she would never have to suffer the reckoning I’m terrified is coming, and I wouldn’t need to hurt this badly, so badly I can barely speak sometimes. I hate myself, when I think those thoughts.

I don’t know what to do. I wish I did. I wish I could end this with a call to action, somewhere to donate or someone to vote for or a petition to sign. My only plea is that if you do see something you can do, please act on it. No matter our personal political leanings and how that may align or not, please make healing the planet a priority with me, because literally nothing else matters if we don’t.

(The comic text, of course, comes from the famous Carl Sandburg poem, which I have always found vaguely ominous.)