Failures of Imagination

and little ways to "make things okay"

My daughter has a wonderful imagination. She has started to tell us bedtime stories sometimes, often starring Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In one of her stories, Rudolph and his parents went to the planet Bluto and when they came back, Rudolph was sick and “Do you know why his medicine is red? Because it’s Mars-flavored medicine.”

Her mind is a delight.

Last night, I glided over the surface of sleep as adrenaline and anxiety pulsed through me. My body feels very much like it has in other times of acute grief. Repeatedly, I got up, drank water, and wandered into my daughter’s room, lying in bed with her for a few minutes, watching her sleep. When I returned to my bed, I repeated in my head a mantra that rose from my subconscious, “I will get up every day and make our world okay for her.”

Around 3:30, I accidentally woke her up on one of these circuits, jostling her blankets just enough that I disturbed her. I held my breath, hoping that the moment would pass and she would slip back into sleep. She rolled over and smiled in surprise. The look of delight on her face to find me next to her is a keepsake for a mother’s heart.

“I had a nightmare,” I told her. “Can I stay with you for a little bit?”

My child is too young to understand my fears about the climate and environmental impacts. She does not know how worried I am that pollution will make her sick, or climate change will rob her of the natural world she loves to explore—perhaps even of our security or our lives. She is too young to know how scared I am that our stability and happiness will fall to tyranny. But nightmares she understands. “What did you dream about?” she asked.

“That I was lost,” I fibbed. *

“When I was three, I had a nightmare, so I invited myself into your bed and then took myself back to my bed and in the morning I sprayed bad dream spray so it wouldn’t happen again,” she recounted, patting my hair.

“So, can I stay for a while?” Closeness with her allowed me to get a few hours of sleep. When I closed my eyes, I saw her face, and I repeated to myself, “I will get up every day and make our world okay for her.”

As I tried to figure out what it means to make things okay for my little girl, I thought about giving up on writing. It already feels like such a long shot to have any success as it is, and now what is the point? All that matters is this family, this little girl.

At dawn, as I drank coffee and listened to my daughter tell me a story, weaving my lie of a nightmare into a narrative of dark woods full of animals, she reminded me that we tell stories and we create for many reasons, but one of them is joy. Because creating pleases us.

I often fret about a failure of imagination in our politics and our leadership. We do not embrace big changes that could lead us to a better, thriving society because we have a hard time imagining a system other than what we know. We, for example, fail to imagine abundance that is not tied to economic growth, even though degrowth has the potential to lead to more equitable and healthy communities.

In my own little way, I was failing to imagine creativity outside of a traditional notion of “success.” I have been so focused on trying to build something here on the farm and on Substack and in my writing, and feeling like I am getting nowhere. But now, after a clarifying, sleepless night, as it feels like everything could fall apart, nothing matters but the love at the center of it all.

So what does it mean to make our world okay for my daughter? I don’t know. In so many ways, we are lucky, but there’s a lot outside of our control. Today, making our world okay meant getting up and being present, really present with her, listening to her, playing in the snow even though I really didn’t want to. Speaking in a soft voice, keeping the edge out.

It meant going to read to her classroom this morning.

It meant taking her to bring our molding jack-o-lantern to our chickens.

Pretending to be Mama Polar Bear.

Protecting her childhood from my fears.

And in the days to come, although I am not a skilled artist, or a trained scientist, or a powerful person, I hope that she and I and her father and our animals can find many little ways to make things okay, and to share little bits of beauty from this Life Among the Alpacas with you.