Ash Temin—Age 35, Boston, MA
Dear child,
The autumn is unspooling, the days growing shorter, dusted with the chill that portends the coming season of loss. The trees light fire against cobalt skies, reaching to the heavens even as they loose their leaves to earth. I watch the world change around me, and I breathe in the frosty mornings, feeling that each gloss of frozen dew calls from within me the hope for new beginnings, even when the slow death of the world unfolds around me.
I stand, amazed, and touch the ache that exists in this paradox: that death can be so beautiful, that loss allows me to gently caress the bruises within me which will never fully heal, that sadness fills the spaces in the heart and allows me to swim in the full swell of being alive.
You have been with me for thirty-three autumns, now, though my awareness only found you in the middle of that span of life. The first time my body grew tender, the first time the softness and ache drew tears, the first time the blood flowed down in release—it was then that I knew you were there, waiting. And as the years passed you grew and changed in my mind. There were the years when I pictured you as the first of many, ruling over a brood with a gentle firmness I hoped you would find in your mama. There was a long section of life, the echoes of which still haunt the chambers of my heart, when I heard your small voice with an Irish accent. I saw your tiny legs running through the greenest grass I had ever known, climbing the ancient oaks, pulling the leaves around you. I saw you on a wind-formed beach where the grey of the sky met the grey of the sea and the roiling of the waters swept the sands silver. And then, after a time of deep heartbreak and loss, I saw your swaddled limbs running through the fire-kissed colors of a New England autumn, your cheeks tinted pink by the briskness of the air, your face alive to the beauty of a place where the ocean and the mountains linked arms and loved fiercely.
But even as I pictured you, loved you, felt that I knew you, even then I knew also the profundity of doubt, ambivalence. I knew, with increasing certainty, that your childhood fears would not consist exclusively of imaginary terrors or invisible monsters under your bed. I knew it as I watched rivers dry, watched mountains burn, watched floods wash away homes and lives. I knew it as wars escalated, as nuclear disasters and oil spills were swept under tables by a mass media more interested in selling easy narratives. I knew it when a blazing hot day in September and a February day which felt like early summer stirred the voices in my body which said: this is not right. The rhythms of life are being disrupted, corrupted. My body knows the truths which my mind cannot grasp. The earth of which I am one tiny part is dying. The dirt and sand which run through my fingers are tinged with blood.
And so it was that when I met the man who I knew would be your father, my sadness grew in measure with my joy. As time gave depth and intimacy to our relationship, we talked of you, both of us with doubt in our voices and sadness in our eyes. We asked questions without answers, questions which echoed long into the dark nights and still echo now, as my fingers find these words. We asked whether we had a right to create a life to inhabit a world filled with violence and loss, a world which was changing and would continue to change profoundly as the months and years unfolded. We asked what it would mean to birth a human being who might only know the memory of what beauty had once been, the legacy of loss. Could we add one more mouth to the billions already vying for nourishment, even if we would love and nurture and adore the one to whom it belonged?
The questions breed more questions. The answers are partial, painful, occasionally softened with a fine skein of hope. And so you may one day come, your tiny fingers wrapping around my thumb, your lips sucking life from my breast, the full bright love of you making your father’s teary eyes dance. You may grow up in a world that is changing beyond what we are able to imagine, and you may yet find beauty in its brokenness. You may know the same mountains and oceans whose landscapes inhabit your parents’ hearts. Or you may know of what they once were through the stories we tell. You may feel a despair you cannot name, because it has been passed on through the generations. And there is the faintest possibility, the tiny seed of it-could-be, in which you would grow strong on an earth which was growing healthier, bolstered by a humanity whose love finally overcame its greed.
But I do not know. I do not know if your soul will take root in my body. I do not know if we will choose to let your soul fly instead, waiting in the ethers until an alternate future makes embodiment possible. I only know this: I would never wish you harm. I would only wish for you freedom, love, wild generosity and connection to the earth of which you are made. And if finding those elements means that we will not hold your sweet softness, not lock eyes with your small being, not be yours in this lifetime, then may the loss of you make us better lovers and better family for all those already here.
