Columns | Mother of All Messes

Watching the Clock: On Parenting in the Climate Crisis

I practice thinking about time like a geologist, but, mostly, I can manage only to think about it like a mother.

This is Mother of All Messes, a column by Kaitlyn Teer on the work of mothering in the climate crisis. 

My three-year-old is learning to tell time.

She stands in front of the oven, hopping on one foot, looking up at the blue digits on the stovetop clock. She can read off the numbers, but can’t yet name the minutes greater than twenty.

“It’s six-five-eight,” she’ll say. “Is it bedtime?”

In the morning, the ring around the face of her okay-to-wake clock glows yellow as six a.m. approaches, then turns green to let her know when she can start her day. I wake before her to write. Some mornings I hear her door creak open and watch her shadow descend the stairs. Other mornings, I hear her still in bed, calling for me, “Can you come wake me up?”

When she is negotiating more screen time, she’ll plead her case: “Just five more minutes.”

In the kitchen while we’re making supper, she’ll shout “Freeze!” And my spouse and I will hold very still in exaggerated poses until she reverses her spell by yelling, “Unfreeze!”

From the backseat, where she sits with her baby brother, she makes eye contact with me in the rearview mirror on the way to preschool. “Are we going to be late?”

Until a few months ago, every memory my daughter recounted happened “yesterday.” Now, she speaks of the past in terms of last week, last month, last year. And what she has already intuited about the future is that time runs out.

Sometimes when I am tucking her into bed, she’ll turn to me, her face searching mine in the dim glow of the night light, and ask, in a voice that cuts through the shushing of the white noise machine: “Mama, when will you die?”

*

A check of the Climate Clock tells me that, as I write this, there are six years, three hundred and thirteen days, two hours, twenty-eight minutes, and three seconds left to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The makers of the Climate Clock argue that its fifteen digits are the most important numbers in the world. Earth has a deadline, they announced when they reprogrammed the Metronome, a sixty-two-foot digital clock in New York City’s Union Square, to display a countdown until the moment when the worst effects of global warming become irreversible.

I can watch the seconds tick by on a bright red banner at the top of the project’s official website. I can hear my daughter reading off the clock’s numbers: “six-three-one-three-two …” Like the busy people walking in Union Square, I can feel the clock’s red glare looming overhead as I go about my day. While caring for my children or working on a lesson plan or making dinner, I am watching the clock, marking my own countdown. When time runs out, my children will be ten and seven.

*

“Where do rocks come from?” Another of my daughter’s bedtime questions, one that tests the limits of what I remember learning about geology in school. I kept a rock collection as a child, filling several shoeboxes, but now I can offer only a rough overview of the rock cycle.

“Let’s learn about rocks together,” I say the next morning. Seated at the kitchen table in front of my laptop, I pull up our public library’s catalog to request several picture books about fossils and rocks for my daughter and, for me, Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness: How Thinking Like A Geologist Can Help Save the World. I hope the book might offer perspective for reframing my climate grief, or at the very least, help me nurture my daughter’s curiosity about the natural world.

Parenting has so contracted the timescales by which I measure life that I speak of it in much smaller increments.

Rock by rock, Bjornerud says, geologists mapped time. In doing so, these geochronologists plotted the story of Earth’s earliest days, a record of how it transformed over billions of years. In between breastfeeding and answering emails, I try to contemplate deep time, but I keep getting interrupted. Geologists may speak of epochs, yet parenting has so contracted the timescales by which I measure life that I speak of it in much smaller increments. It’s hard to hold in mind the immensity of planetary history when the demands of the present feel so immediate and overwhelming, and thinking about the uncertain future my children face is almost more than I can bear.

Among the problems Bjornerud identifies with Western conceptions of time is the pervasiveness of time denial, or chronophobia. There’s pressure from the beauty and wellness industries to avoid the appearance of aging. There’s the influence of Christian denominations that preach Young Earth creationism and prophesy that the end is imminent. There’s capitalism’s insistence on ever-increasing levels of consumption and growth. Taken together, this cultural ignorance of the planet’s past and reluctance to take a clear-eyed look at its future complicate the efforts to address climate change. In response, Bjornerud advocates for what she calls a “polytemporal worldview,” one that holds together the various rates of change that take place on our planet—some fast, some slow.

Even if I can’t fathom deep time, motherhood, at least, has prepared me for a polytemporal worldview; my children are always changing and the passage of time feels paradoxical, fast and slow. A polytemporal worldview, Bjornerud says, may help with another kind of chronophobia: the fear of death, a fear that is newly present in my daughter’s consciousness, a fear that I’m experiencing anew through her questions.

Reading Bjornerud, I practice thinking about time like a geologist, but, mostly, I can manage only to think about it like a mother.

*

Motherhood has fundamentally altered my perception of time, giving me the opportunity to witness a human lifetime in its entirety. From birth, I counted my children’s ages in days, then weeks, then months. It wasn’t until my daughter’s second birthday that I started referring to years.

When she turned three, my daughter’s preschool invited us to participate in a birthday celebration. During circle time, her classmates sat, cross-legged and squirming on carpet squares, while she stood with her arms around a stuffed globe. Holding the planet to her heart, she orbited a small Sun at the circle’s center. As she walked, her teacher read a version of my daughter’s life story, one I’d written in my own handwriting, tasked with filling in the blanks of a worksheet from her take-home folder. I could feel time’s passage in my body as I watched her, each year a revolution completed in a matter of seconds. For a moment, I felt seized by chronophobia, and I tried not to flash forward to her at ten years old, when the time remaining on the Climate Clock will expire. Then, I was all smiles for the toddlers clamoring for small party favors, the temporary tattoos and bouncy balls my daughter had picked out for her classmates.

I know that if our lives proceed as hoped for, at some point, my children will go on without me. It’s a fact I feel with greater urgency after my grandmother passed away recently, an event that prompted my daughter to ask more questions.

“Did the dinosaurs die and turn into dirt?” she asks from the backseat, thinking about mass extinction.

“Some did,” I said, “and some turned into fossils.”

Then she asks, “When I die, will I turn back into dirt?”

“We all will,” I hear my spouse say, because I can’t.

“And then no one will ever see us again?” she asks—a question that feels hard and heavy as a rock. Then, quieter, she says, “I don’t like dying.”

I don’t like it, either. My attempts to provide age-appropriate explanations about what happens when we die and reassurances about how much time we have left, feel false at worst and inadequate at best.

In moments like these, reminded of our mortality, I wish I had more power over time. I feel the childish urge to freeze it, as if we could remain together forever in a state of suspended animation.

Whether I am watching the clock as it ticks down to bedtime or I am so immersed in playing with my children that I’ve forgotten to mind it; whether I desire more time with my children or more time for myself; whether I feel time’s passage as too fast or too slow, I never have enough of it. Time runs out.

*

The makers of the Climate Clock were inspired by the Doomsday Clock, a clock which has been ticking my whole life. For decades, it was the cover art for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and it has since become a universally recognized symbol for assessing the risk of global catastrophe.

The Doomsday Clock was the work of Martyl Langsdorf, a landscape artist and the wife of a Manhattan Project physicist who petitioned President Truman not to use the atomic bomb and organized the Bulletin’s nuclear nonproliferation efforts. She created the clock in 1947 and, in order to convey the urgency of the moment, set the time to seven minutes to midnight. Its bold, modern design is simple but iconic. Black and white. A quarter-circle. Two lines for hands. Four dots in place of numbers.

I was born with three minutes left on the Doomsday Clock. That was before the grassroots Nuclear Freeze Movement, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, before the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, before the dissolution of the Soviet Union—events which turned back the clock to seventeen minutes to midnight.

My daughter was born with two minutes on the clock, owing not just to nuclear armament, but also to the interconnected threats of bioterrorism and global warming.

Earlier this year, on the day I gave birth to my son, the Bulletin’s president announced that the clock was set at 100 seconds to midnight. The official statement reads: “[T]he Clock remains the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment.”

A question on the FAQ page of the Bulletin’s website: “Which is the greater threat: nuclear weapons or climate change?”

“At the end of the day, trying to answer the question is like standing around in a burning house arguing about whether it is better to die of smoke inhalation or from a falling timber.”

I keep meeting my children in these midnight hours. If the Earth is a house that’s burning, there is no fire escape. I can hear the smoke detectors blaring as I try to rock my babies back to sleep, patting their backs in the age-old rhythm of reassurance.

*

This summer I noticed a meme circulating during heat waves. In it, a child whines, “This is the hottest summer of my life.” In response, a parent warns, “This is the coldest summer of the rest of your life.” This dialogue is often superimposed on an image of Bart and Homer Simpson. Aesthetics aside, the meme is a sobering reminder of what’s at stake when it comes to global warming, and yet, it promotes a kind of climate nihilism that I’m trying to resist.

My thoughts about this image are connected to another parenting meme that circulates each summer, one I’ve come to resent for what it implies about keeping time. Of its many iterations, nearly always there is a sunlit child playing near water, the camera at their backs. The text reads something like: “We only have eighteen summers together.” Not unlike the Climate Clock or the Doomsday Clock, the eighteen-summers meme is a kind of countdown that puts pressure on parents, especially mothers. A good mother knows to make every moment count, an imperative that haunts me.

These memes illustrate what is, for me, one of the most frustrating parts of parenting: I am always on the clock. I have come to associate the clock with guilt—mom guilt and climate guilt. I feel guilty for the time I spend working instead of with my children; guilty when I resent how mothering keeps me from my work; guilty when I choose extractive, time-saving conveniences instead of more sustainable, albeit slower, methods of managing care work. I live in a perpetual state of time scarcity, one that’s heightened by the existential threat of the climate crisis.

Julie Phillips calls this time scarcity “maternal time” in The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and The Mind-Baby Problem, her examination of how twentieth-century artists, writers, and activists held together the demands of mothering and creative work. Phillips writes, “The work of care alters time, linking humans to the past and future, tying us to the present, insisting on simultaneity, allowing moments of selfhood, committing us to nostalgia and futurity.”

Maternal time is at odds with Western constructs of time. Some forms of labor simply take time; they cannot be optimized for profit and may not produce results for decades, if ever. Like making art or engaging in activism, the work of caregiving is inefficient and undervalued. It’s a conflict exacerbated by capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy—forces that imperil the planet.

*

When my daughter was a newborn and I was recovering from giving birth, I rocked her to sleep in my arms, and while she slept, I read Braiding Sweetgrass, a collection of essays by Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. I wanted to read something tender, and the book promised healing stories for restoring our relationships with the land; I did not expect so much of it to be about time and mothering.

When Kimmerer’s daughters were young, she moved with them to a farmhouse by an old pond. In “A Mother’s Work,” she writes of her yearslong efforts to restore that pond, of weekends spent raking mats of algae. “Making my pond swimmable would be an exercise in turning back time. That’s just what I wanted, to turn back time,” she reflects. “My daughters were growing up too fast, my time as a mother slipping away, and my promise of a swimming pond yet to be fulfilled.” As her last summer with a child at home comes to an end, the pond is not yet swimmable. Kimmerer finds comfort in imagining that, if not her own children, someday her grandchildren may swim in the pond.

I am always on the clock. I have come to associate the clock with guilt—mom guilt and climate guilt.

She concludes that caregiving is circular and finds that as she ages, her circle of care grows beyond her family, to encompass her community, and even planetary systems.

Later in the book, she writes of circular time. She holds that origin stories are both history and prophecy. In her view, time does not run out: “Time is not a river,” she says, “running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river.” Rooted in a sense of abundance rather than scarcity, her perspective on time offers a corrective to my chronophobia.

I am trying to see time as circular, like water; something that can change states, turn from liquid to ice and back again, a renewable resource. I feel its circularity when my mother tells me that my grandmother, from her hospice bed, cried out for comfort from her own mother, whose death had preceded her daughter’s by decades. I think of my grandmother now, her calls for her mother echoing like ripples in a dark pond, when my daughter calls for me in the middle of the night.

*

While writing this, I’m interrupted by the sound of my daughter’s bedroom door creaking open. It’s not yet late, but it’s past her bedtime. By the time she calls down for me, I am already at the stairs. She jumps into my arms as I approach the top step and wraps herself around me as I carry her back to bed.

She asks for another story.

Earlier, we’d watched the beginning of Frozen, a film we have never finished because of the wolf chase, a scene that frightens my daughter so much she can no longer keep watching. When this happens, I try to soothe her fears. I try to explain to her that this is how stories work, that things fall apart and get scary, but that usually everything works out well in the end. But she is not lured by my promises of a happily ever after. So the kingdom remains frozen, the film paused on screen. Neither of us knows what happens next, which is another way of saying anything could happen.

We lie on my daughter’s bed, face to face, our hands touching. “Tell me a Frozen story,” she says.

“The end,” I say, when it’s over. “It’s time for sleep now.” But she protests. She wants to linger in the world of story, she doesn’t want me to leave.

“But Mama,” she says, “It isn’t the end, yet.”

*

How we tell time and the stories we tell about it matter. When it comes to climate action, there is a productive tension between metaphors that remind us that time is running out and those that remind us that there is still time in which to act.

Bjornerud cautions against watching the clock for midnight. It is a mistake to think of planetary processes as moving only very slowly, when in fact some shifts can happen quite rapidly. “[I]f the 4.5 billion-year story of the Earth is scaled to a 24-hour day, all of human history would transpire in the last fraction of a second before midnight,” she writes. “But this is a wrongheaded, and even irresponsible way to understand our place in Time.” Not only is this metaphor disempowering, it also minimizes the impact that humanity can make in a relatively short amount of time. Worse still, it makes the end seem inevitable. After all, she asks, “what happens after midnight?”

This question reminds me of Rebecca Solnit’s latest climate project, #NotTooLate, which explicitly appeals to making the most of our remaining time, and draws on the work of Black futurists who insist on the radical power of optimism and imagination, of envisioning a future of global flourishing after midnight.

I keep reminding myself that, even on the Doomsday Clock, it’s possible to turn back time.

*

I learned to tell time by moving the red hands of a Judy Clock. Seated at a table in my first-grade classroom, I spun the minute hand and watched the clock’s red and green gears turn as the hours advanced around its cheerful yellow face. I could spin the hands counter-clockwise, too, and watch the gears of time reverse.

Now that I’m teaching my daughter to tell time, I’m realizing that there’s more to it than just reading off numbers from the clock. Soon she will be able to read the Climate Clock’s countdown and determine for herself what it means. I’ll listen to her tell her own stories about it.

Her fourth summer is over now, perhaps the hottest-coldest summer of her life. It has been the summer of temporary tattoos, hours spent snipping out colorful cartoons with her child-sized scissors and applying them to her skin and mine. Hundreds of little things that have marked us, then worn off. A thermometer, a red heart, a clock.

This morning, before preschool, she cut out another tattoo for me. Words written backwards so that they would be legible once applied. She placed it on the inside of my wrist, covering it with a wet cloth, which she held tenderly as she counted to twenty, skipping only the number sixteen.

She removed her hand to reveal the message on my skin: carpe diem. I look down at my wrist now, and already it is fading.