our kids aren't going to save us

Ever since I was a very little girl I knew that the teens of today will save the world. Or make that the teens of yesterday. When I was around ten, I remember hearing someone say that it was up to the (then) teens to make the big changes the world needed. Wow! I thought! They're going to fix the ozone layer! And pollution! And get rid of nuclear weapons forever! And this new thing called global warming that we were just starting to hear whispers of. I looked forward to the beautiful world those just a few years older than I was were creating for me. 

A few years later, when I graduated, and couldn't yet even vote, that burden of saving the world had shifted to my shoulders. I was the generation that was going to make the big changes. Well, OK, I thought. I can do that. I don't know what the rest of the generations were doing -- I mean, what happened to those teens from when I was a kid? Didn't they fix things? Well anyway now things were different. And me, I was going to finally fix things. We were going to finally fix things!!

Fast forward another five years and find me teaching some teens in a rec centre art program. It wasn't that I wasn't "fixing" the world, but plans for great upheaval, protests and really doing something big were on the back-burner as the need for paying rent and paying off my student loans was forefront in my mind. I tried to keep climate change and social justice on the menu during all activities, but, you know, that's not what parents were looking for in these art classes, so I had to temper it. You can't rock the boat too much if you're a new teacher and trying to keep your job; trying to keep people opening their wallets to pay you for teaching their kids. I figured I'd change the world when I made enough money.

Another couple of years later, I was joyfully welcoming my own kids to the world. It was even more imperative to me to save the world from the increasingly terrifying prospect of climate change which, by calculations at the time, was likely to cause global catastrophe by the time my kids were old. Well... if we didn't stop it, which we planned to. The only thing was, we all still needed to make money, and to do that we had to keep our jobs, and keep up the status quo, and really support the industries we knew were destroying the earth's ability to regulate the climate because, well, those companies had bought out all the smaller companies and were now the only affordable ways for us purchase the many many things that seemed to be required for home-life and babies! After all, what good is protecting your kids' future, if you can't even give them a semi-normal, socially-conforming lifestyle to start out with? But you know what I told myself then? Those kids I taught. They were about graduating age by now. They were coming up to voting age, and not yet burdened with the need to pay rent and student loans and preschool fees. They would save us!

Climate change, as we know, eclipsed the miraculously-diminishing ozone hole, as well as nuclear weapons threats, in the list of potential perils. And by the time my kids were ten years old, we knew for certain that their lives would be cut short by the ever-growing, ever-menacing list of catastrophes caused by climate change. In fact, the hurricanes, forest-fires and floods had already begun, and we began to realize that even our own lives would likely end in a kind of apocalypse we 80's kids had never fully imagined. Around that time it began to be acceptable to use the word apocalypse in my blog posts. Nobody was shocked, anymore. We were apathetic. We couldn't not give our kids tons of gifts, because we wanted them to be happy! We couldn't not buy the plastic toys and fleece clothing that they needed to fit in with their friends. We couldn't step off of the rat-race treadmill because somehow we had to afford all these things, and we still weren't managing to take them on enough vacations for their social and emotional well-being. We knew we were doomed. So we sipped up our lattes and attended some climate rallies on lunch-breaks, and told ourselves that the teens of the current generation would save us.

My son voted, this week. He's eighteen. I just can't bring myself to tell him to save me. 

This is bullshit, and we all know it. Telling ourselves that each new generation will fix the mistakes of the twenty before it is a bright shiny carousel of lies we tell ourselves so we don't have to make the hard changes that are required to save ourselves from climate change. And those changes are HARD! We're all going to have to sacrifice the tarred dreams we pursued; we're all going to have to sacrifice our income, social status and the careers, homes, vacations; even relationships that are threatening our sustainable future. Because if we don't, our future is far more bleak than we can imagine. And I don't want that for my kids. I don't want that for me. 

We have to stop buying things we don't need. We have to reassess the meaning of the word "need", according to a non-commercialized, non-selfish scale. We have to stop supporting industries and corporations that are fiscally tied to financial gain. The pursuit of money isn't saving the world; it's destroying it. Growth isn't saving the world; it's destroying it. We have to stop seeking more, and start acknowledging how much joy there is in what we already have. We have children. We have love.

My son was interviewed by our local paper about his first voting experience, and he had this to say: "I think a lot of politicians are afraid to take the necessary drastic steps to counteract climate change because of the possible short term cost to our economy, but I say it's worth it to ensure that we have a safe, livable future for us and our families going on into the future."

In the upcoming election, we have an opportunity to stand up and vote for the candidate or party who is most likely to make the hard changes. People, get out and vote. Then let's look at our lives honestly and just make the changes we should have made decades ago. We are adults and it's time we started behaving like adults. It's time that we all stood up and made the change we want to see in the world, instead of expecting our kids to do it for us.

Why every kid should be raised as if they might be LGBTQ

 

Today is National Coming Out Day. I didn't even know that was a thing, until I saw it posted on Facebook this morning and went to Google it. As a parent I've tried to be so careful; so deliberately woke, but, like the term 'woke', I'm watered down. 

When my kids were little, I consciously referred to their future partners as a genderless "they", or "he or she". I wasn't very familiar with trans culture at the time, and my only gender-defying parenting feats were to encourage them to play with all manner of toys, and to dress themselves in every colour, and every style of clothing. If I knew then what I know now, I would have encouraged them to choose their own pronouns, too. Some brave souls are raising kids that way, now. And in 2016 the province of Alberta presented schools with guidelines for allowing students to choose and live by their own preferred pronouns. Amazingly (or not, when you consider the culture we live in), both of my kids subscribed to gender stereotypes from very early ages, and defined themselves as cis-straight. I defied - just in case - and kept telling them that was fine, but that I would love them and their partners no matter what genders or pronouns they may happen to use. I wanted to be sure that there was never a day when my kids questioned their sexuality or gender, and didn't feel safe talking about it. I didn't just wait for the conversations, I started them.

And when my trans cousin committed suicide just after Trump was elected, I started even more conversations. Can you imagine knowing that your cousin felt so unwelcome in society that he no longer wanted to live, and then perhaps discovering you might be similarly different from the norm? I don't know what my kids' place on the spectrum of gender and sexuality is, and they had only met our cousin once, but I needed them to know that they had a safe space; that their feelings would always be valid, even if they change, and even if they don't want to talk about them. The necessity of being an accepting parent became deeper and more desperate for me.We attended Pride like it was our special family party, having finally had a taste of the loss from which pride is cultivated; the ashes from which humanity is trying to rise.

When my kids were little I was told that if I didn't help them identify as cis and straight, I was damaging their sense of self-worth, messing with their identity, and setting them up for bullying. Those comments terrified me, because what I'm trying to do is the opposite. But I carry on anyway, because you know what really damages kids' self-worth? Feeling like they're not acceptable to their own parents. All kids are potentially going to question their sexuality or gender. Everybody should question those things, just so we can know ourselves and live our best lives, with open eyes. If we want our potentially-LGBTQ kids to feel self-worth, we need to openly accept and advocate for LGBTQ people in our community, so they can see people they may or may not identify with, and feel safe around them. Even if our kids are consistently cis-gendered and straight, they need to know that it's normal not to be, as well. They need to have no fear about identity, love, or their belonging in community. So no, I'm not messing with their identity - I'm refraining from messing with their identity. Because it's theirs to determine. Not mine.

Bullying is scary. I'm telling you, as the girl who knelt, eating weiners off the floor, being kicked by my classmates, while my teacher stood at the font of the room looking through her papers. You know what I did when they stopped? I went outside and I told a younger kid that I'd magically turn her into a frog if she didn't give me the swing. She ran away crying, and I took that swing and my pride and rode it all the way through recess. I felt terrible about becoming a bully, myself, and it's what makes me so determined to raise children who feel secure enough to be neither victims nor perpetrators. Fear is what makes bullies. Fear is what makes victims. The only way to give our kids a ticket out of this dynamic is to make sure they know they're safe in who they are; that they can always come home to a pair of loving, accepting arms. No matter what.

Accepting our kids is not as much about being OK with whomever they become as it is about being OK with the whole world, so our kids know that they'll be acceptable, whomever they become. They have to be accepted to become themselves. The right to self-determination is as important as shelter, food, love and security. It isn't any of my business what my kids' gender or sexuality may be, but it's my business to provide a safe place for them to self-identify, and to be flexible enough in my own mind that whenever their identity changes, I'm ready to accept it. And there is no end-point; no final level of consciousness to achieve. There's just a constant, always-learning, growth.

finding hope when there is no good news anymore

Seeds in Spallumcheen Graveyard, September 2020

I'm struggling hugely to keep on finding positive things to say; positive ways to look at the collapse we're now experiencing and keep seeing a good way forward. They say this is a natural feeling of hopelessness, six months into the pandemic, but I know it's more than the pandemic. The giant, horrible, depressing pandemic is just one small thing that happened to the world this year. Climate change is so much worse. With the ongoing rampage of fires, floods, storms, extinctions, social unrest and ecological collapse, people are spouting F2020 memes all over the place, but we pretty much know next year will be worse. And F2021 just won't have the same ring to it.

I've tried looking away from the news, but my daughter danced into my room this morning, grinning because "Trump has coronavirus", and all my pessimistic mind could think was how that would just create sympathy among his growing number of supporters, and be followed by more hate. Everything he does or doesn't do either supports, provokes or emboldens more hatred. Why? Because Trump isn't the problem; people are. Every single one of us who is running around scared and looking for somebody to either blame or help us is the problem. Every single one of us who hasn't nurtured a feeling of empowered possibility is the problem. And I have nurtured that feeling of empowerment, and yet I'm still feeling so helpless, now. Everywhere I turn is a problem too big for me to solve.

I've spent so much of my life trying to convince myself and those I care for that trust and understanding will carry us through anything; love will save us. I still have love, but we're all afraid to hug the people we love, and we don't know if our homes will burn down or wash away next year, and we don't know if the pandemic will ever end.

Are you waiting for this to turn positive? Me too. What are we going to do, people? How am I going to make it OK that I bore two children into a world without hope? The usual means of supplying hope aren't working. We want to have Thanksgiving under the harvest moon, but it's obscured by smoke - the particles of our southern neighbours, their animals, farms and forests all burned and floating through our sky. We went to meet our new puppy and our son pointed out that the road-trip we took to get to her was ecologically irresponsible. And he was right. I'm still waiting for this to turn positive.

OK here goes: My little grain of hope. I had to get that off my chest in order to get to this; it's the compost from which I hope my little seed will grow. Generosity. Gift. And love, after all. 

I turned off my computer, walked away from the stream of bad news: politicians lying, stealing and grappling for power, parents panicking and people dying, forests and neighbourhoods burning; the infestation of moths beginning to lie dead all over the place. I felt the familiar grip of despair around my heart; I made a thermos of tea and went to give a tour to some local gardeners. I work for free, now, most of the time. Under the smoky sky, we talked about the future of their garden, and how they plan to expand it, but with respect and understanding of the wilderness it grew from. They paid me with a kabocha squash, fresh-cut from their land. Then I went with my son to film the next episode of our Outdoor Exploration video series with a local mushroomer. And under the smoky sky we talked about the mycelium spreading itself, below us; the rotting, spore-y mushrooms proliferating themselves all over. She gave me a bunch of lobster mushrooms, which we enjoyed for our dinner. Every week I consult with parents who are struggling during the many stresses of pandemic life. I hear their stories and share mine, and tell them I know they're doing the best they can, and I support them, and sometimes they offer their own services in exchange. My children give food and water to our chickens, and just this week they have begun returning from the coop with eggs. I put seeds in the ground and, despite all odds, they grow.

Can we hold each other through this horrible time, even knowing that it might not end? Can you wrap your arms around me again so I can feel the comfort of not being alone? Can we plant seeds of respect and understanding in each other's hearts; give when and what we can without knowing that anything will grow, but hoping? Can we do this, even in the face of all the horrors? I love you. Whoever you are, and although we haven't met, and no matter how our politics or moral standards may differ, and even if you don't love me back... I love you. Let our love be a well-tended soil, as we keep on planting seeds of hope, even in the face of all odds, and grow.

I took my kids to see the old church in the town I once lived in, but it was boarded up, so we just stood together and looked at it. Love is constant, even when the world around us changes. September 2020.