Sitting, nauseous with morning sickness, on a park bench in the bright heat of an unusually hot spring day my partner and I watch children march past us, striking from school:

“What’s the point of an education if we have no future,” their signs say.

My heart relocates itself, sinking down somewhere around my ankles. They have 10 more years of habitable planet than the baby I am carrying.

In early summer of the same year, after a miscarriage, I find myself pregnant again in the week that megafires tear through the state. There are 70-metre flames producing their own weather systems, driving them further on across the countryside, through the bushland that relies on fire to stimulate new life, on to forests that have never before burnt.

The sky over our Canberra home is tinged orange, the air is thick and sticks in the back of your throat in such a way that no coughing seems to dislodge the sensation. The whole country is suffocating. We haven’t seen the sky in a month.

Outside, the particle count is only 200 PM2.5 today. Yesterday it was 700, more than double the highest warning of “hazardous”. Two months ago we’d never looked at fine particle readings. We didn’t know the difference between a 10-micrometre particle that can be filtered out by your respiratory system, and one smaller than 2.5 micrometres, that will find its way right into your bloodstream.

I wonder if my child will ever have the innocence I had two months ago, of not having to think about whether the air will kill you.

Locked in my house, waiting for a high-grade pollution mask to arrive by post, I press my nose up against the glass doors, looking at where my front fence should be. “So this is what it’s like to have a baby at the end of the world.”

**

There’s always a leap of faith in choosing to have a child. Will they be healthy? Can you provide for them? Will you be a good parent? Will you even know how to be a parent? We have to suspend our own disbelief in ourselves. We Can Do This. I Can Do This.

There are times in history where that leap has been more existential.

I can only imagine that women anxiously questioned “What world will be left for my child?” during the cold war. During epidemics. During genocide. And I presume they continued because, despite the terror, they still had hope. Hope that the atrocities of humanity, the threat of disease, would quiet. Hope that their child would be one of the lucky ones.

How different is this existential leap to the one women must take now? To quiet their minds as the world burns? In some ways the threat is both more abstract and more overwhelming.

War is an immediate threat to life. But war can stop as abruptly as it starts.

Climate collapse is less immediate – there is, at least presently and for most of us, no imminent loss of life. But, unlike war, it cannot be stopped. Perhaps it can be slowed. Maybe a little of the damage already done could be mitigated. But as my climate researcher friend explained to me this year: “There’s an analogy we use to explain climate change to students. We say: it’s like traffic. You’re not in traffic, you are traffic.”

**

I lost two babies in 2019. With each loss, I both grieved and felt something lift from my chest. “What is that lifting?” I searched. “Why is there the smallest touch of relief each time this happens?” I dug.

Guilt was the answer. It was guilt sitting on my chest while I was pregnant, that sits there now while I write – pregnant again.

Guilt for creating another human that has to live on this planet. Guilt for my unborn child that they will not live the kind of comfortable life that I have. That the things that we know we can pass on to protect our children from suffering, that previous generations have sought to pass on, will do little. Education, wisdom, wealth are useless when there is no air.

When I expressed this guilt, or rather its dispersion, after I lost babies friends would say, “Don’t feel climate guilt. We need a smart, informed generation if we’re going to get out of this.” Or, “It’s kids like yours, like mine, that are going to change things.” In these comments I see the hope they are reaching for, the way they quiet their mind when they worry “what world will be left for my child?” as countless women before them have.

I envy them that hope. Maybe, it will become the straw I too cling to when I finally do bring a child into this world. I nod as they talk – perhaps more to themselves than to me – and stop words leaving my lips: “Thinking your child will be part of the solution, not the problem, is hubris.” We are the collapse. Our children are the collapse.

**

Why, you might ask, if I think “my child could be part of the solution” is merely self-soothing hubris, do I keep getting pregnant? Why if I have no hope like my friends am I so determined that I’ve now become pregnant for the third time in a year?

There are two answers to this. One is that I hope the hope will come.

The other is that in choosing between the sadness of living a childfree existence because I do not believe the Earth can survive us, and the sadness of having a child whose future may be limited – I choose the latter. When I weigh them up, hold each in my mind and my hands and see which is heavier, I decide time and again that the latter is a sadness I can more easily carry.

I think of my child, of the relationship I will have with them and the world we will live in, like the time my mother was terminally ill.

When my mother had cancer there was 12 months between her diagnosis and her death. I knew she would die. But knowing that didn’t mean I didn’t spend time with her. Didn’t laugh with her. Find joy and beauty in our relationship. Enjoy the experiences we could have, while we had time. And so it is, we must reach for the pieces of beauty the world still offers us. The clear blue sky when we have it. A child watching a bee feeding in the garden. The sounds of a flock of native birds passing overhead. We, my child-to-be and I, will visit the world on its deathbed.



