Motherhood in a Pandemic

By Kate Thompson, Safina Center Launchpad Fellow

I learned I was pregnant with my daughter last November. Choosing to bring a new life into the world, especially your first child, brings you to wonder what kind of world exactly you’re calling her into. The new decade began, and my first trimester ended. I didn’t reflect on the world I hoped for her to inherit as much as the damaged planet to which she would be consigned. A medical anthropologist and conservationist by training, I thought mostly (and guiltily) of overpopulation and carrying capacities. In the span of six more months, that weighty question has become immeasurably more prescient.  

Kate with baby Carmen. Photo: Kate Thompson

In the first days of her life, our daughter Carmen stared into faces obscured by masks. Mine, my partner’s, and everyone she met. As we were sequestered in our hospital room, a global pandemic continued to raze reality beyond our walls. My sleep-deprived thoughts wandered back to my great uncle Julio, who died as a small child during the 1918 flu epidemic shortly after my family emigrated from Colombia (add that ominous vignette to the general anxiety of new parenthood). The nurses explained the basics of newborn care before we were discharged. Their advice was interspersed with details on quarantining, social distancing and infectivity. Alien words now familiar parts of our lexicon. Bringing her home, we carried her through a neighborhood roiling with racial tension, in a nation reckoning with the inextricable bigotry of its history, and of its present. This is the world I pass to my child.

She’s sleeping now as write this. Sometimes I sneak into the bedroom and lean over the bassinet to watch her eyes flit back and forth beneath her eyelids. Late-night google searching suggests that newborns begin to dream within the first two weeks of life. I don’t know what form or language her thoughts take, but I’ve started thinking again about the world I dream of for her.

Photo: Kate Thompson

I want her to come of age in a world where people in positions of power know to yield. As a woman, I want her to be confident enough to lead and wise enough to recognize that leading requires humility. I hope that if she sits in a conference hall as I have as an academic, the seats around her are filled with people of diverse backgrounds and stories. I want her to live in a world that values the ability to listen as much as the eloquence of speech. 

I want her to understand that equality is not and has never been a pie chart—that creating space for someone else does not takes away part of what you have. I hope she lives in a society where it is the norm to amplify the voices and needs of others. A better country where the language of “all lives matter” is relegated to a shameful chapter in history textbooks. Where there is the constant mandate that however things are, they can yet still be better.

When I carry her against my shoulder through Prospect Park, I don’t hope that these trees and thickets still stand when she’s my age. I hope there are more. That she lives to see greenspaces heal and expand. That she is a part of a change in values that prioritizes the intrinsic worth of the natural world. That she experiences the gift of watching humpback whales off the coast of Montauk or aye-ayes in the forests of Madagascar as I have. That she doesn’t think to herself “I got to see them before they go,” as I did. I hope she bears witness to the fruits, and not failures, of our fight to protect wild places. I hope she is part of bringing that dream to fruition. 

Photo: Kate Thompson

I can’t know if she’ll live in a kinder world, or a better one. But I can begin by teaching her that if she strives for change no matter how entrenched the status quo, both she and the world will be better for it. This is the nascent hope I have for the world I pass to my child.