Welcome to the fifth edition of Baby Steps, a column about every single thought and feeling I am having about this kid we are having in LESS THAN A MONTH
The “wind event,” as it had been labeled thus far, was in its early hours two Tuesdays ago as I was writing the last edition of this column. Our group chats had already lit up with panic as fires sparked in the hills. The wind was blowing with anguished fervor. Los Angeles is an enormous swath of land, famously larger than the entirety of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and Gretchen and I live relatively close to its middle. Prior to moving in together last April, both of us lived in parts of town that would eventually fall under evacuation orders that week, but where we live now is relatively safe when it comes to wildfire risk.
Most of the windows in this house are casement-style, secured poorly by lever-style latches. There are three tall ones in the dining room, which is also my office. The lever handle and its washer friend on the far right window fell off its mounting plate months ago and had been jury-rigged by my wife into remaining closed but was quickly blown out on Tuesday. We didn’t have duct tape so I plastered the window shut with packing tape, its efficacy unlikely, but this act felt like an act, I guess. It blew open again, so I moved a heavy chair right up against it. This seemed to do the trick, at least temporarily. Which is how everything suddenly felt, like something that had done the trick — but not for long.
By Tuesday evening, wildfires were raging in the Pacific Palisades and in the Altadena area and the winds were raging everywhere. By Wednesday, a day experienced as a high pitch panic whistle, a friend who’d recently been in our yard painting a onesie at our baby shower reported that she’d lost her home, eventually sending a video of her torched Mazda a few days later, blistering and grey. Whole neighborhoods were getting wiped out. The smoke was visible from every angle, the air thick and foggy, smelling of campfire.
If I’d made it this far into the pregnancy without being forced to face the reality that has inspired many of my generation to forego reproduction altogether, I could do so no longer. The intentionality of conception for a gay person makes me feel particularly culpable. Displacement and disorder, pandemics, epic natural disasters and the post-disaster cycles of repair and rebuilding will perhaps seem routine to him. Masking certainly will. As Kayla wrote last week: “It feels like everyone I know is taking turns living through something environmentally unprecedented or, if not entirely unprecedented, still nightmarish in scale.” Late capitalism and unchecked corporate greed will continue to exacerbate the problem.
Is it ethical to bring a child into a world on its way out, onto a planet in crisis, a crisis guaranteed to worsen over the next four years of a Trump presidency, a crisis that may inspire our son to opt out of having kids of his own? (It is also unfortunate that many humans who are also climate change deniers are intentionally having as many children as possible to ensure an ongoing political and religious majority!) And with so many environmental situations spiraling out of control, it feels absolutely apocalyptic to witness the rise and mass adoption of AI, which will further destroy our planet and our collective minds. Every day we’re told to accept that A.I. is here and we’ll be left behind if we don’t adopt it, but it will leave all of us behind, eventually, too.
Now here we are, a month away from birth in a city on fire. Thousands of families lost everything here, and so did their kids — kids’ artwork, photographs on the fridge, play programs, bikes in the yard. Entire schools burned down. Many were forced to go virtual, again, just like we did at the height of the pandemic. Other expectant mothers, all their baby shower acquisitions, vanished.
But here we are, nevertheless.
We hadn’t originally planned on doing a “babymoon” because we couldn’t afford it, but a few months back we were so very generously gifted an all-expenses-paid weekend in Ojai, set to begin on Thursday, January 9th. Now, amid everything happening in Los Angeles, we didn’t know what to do — was it stupid to still go, should we try and reschedule? (Could we, even?) Or was it stupid to stay?
We’d both already requested the time off work. If we left, would we be clogging up already congested roads needed for evacuees from fire zones? We could leave a key in the lockbox for any friends who needed a place to go. But Penn’s kennel in Santa Monica was two blocks from a mandatory evacuation zone on the edge of the 0% contained Palisades fire, could we really leave her there? Many roads were closed, although every time I checked Google Maps (hourly), they claimed our drive would be swift and clear. Everybody had a different opinion about our best course of action.
But after Wednesday night, the anxiety whiplash was overwhelming, with the Sunset fire, the gridlock, the confusing and myriad evacuation orders — all our friends, who lived mostly in Los Feliz, Frogtown, West Hollywood, Venice — had started evacuating to safer parts of the city, or making plans to leave LA altogether for a few days or a week or more. When we woke up, ash was falling from the sky like smoke. We had to go. Gretchen could not breathe this air; the risks to pregnant women were too severe.
But we also couldn’t leave Penn at a kennel so close to the fires, and that is how the world’s craziest dog earned an invite to our babymoon.
We were so incredibly blessed to even have the option, ultimately, that we already had a room booked for us out of town that we didn’t have to pay for. The drive was, in fact, swift and clear. Google Maps had not been lying about that. In Ojai, the air was clean, the grass was green, actual rich people with their own pets and families drank lattes in their athleisure while talking on their phones, roasting s’more kits with their shaggy-haired children over small, controlled, contained fires. We went on a lot of walks. We ate wonderful food, and went to the gym. I compulsively checked my news apps and the endless stream of horror they relayed, donated to GoFundMes. I read. We went to Beatles Yoga and rode bicycles into town, checking out antique stores and a library book sale. Penn ran through an orchard.
I had an allergic reaction to some essential oil placed over my eyes during a massage on Friday, waking up on the last full day of our vacation with half-swollen eyes, my eyelids and the skin beneath my eyebrow red and inflamed, as if they’d just been aggressively waxed by Satan himself. But when you have one last full day of breathing clean air unmasked with your pregnant wife for an indefinite amount of time in the nicest place you have ever vacationed in your entire life, you are going to go outside and experience it, even if you look like a red raccoon!
With something so big happening, and so many losing so much because of it, it feels so selfish to talk or care about needing to protect Gretchen from air that could harm the kid. We definitely had people urging us to somehow remain beyond city limits because of the air quality, but with her due date around the corner, we’ve gotta be close to our doctor and the hospital. She is masking. We are sealing the windows.
As I type this, Donald Trump is announcing his intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord while claiming “we had the cleanest air and the cleanest water this nation has ever seen under the Trump administration.”
My brother went to New Orleans for college and was a sophomore when Katrina hit. He stayed after graduation, got married, started his family there. They live with the knowledge that another major natural disaster could happen at any time, it’s just a part of their lives, and they don’t want to leave, at least not yet. That’s where their community is, where their friends are.
In many ways, California is one of the best states to live in during a Trump administration. In other ways, we have been reminded, it isn’t.
I fastidiously organize the nursery, air purifiers blowing heartily into the void.
After publishing my last Baby Steps, I felt surprised with myself for writing two things in as many weeks that ended on a vaguely optimistic note, a vibe I’ve generally only truly embodied in my personal writing when swept up in the spell of this or that charismatic friend or lover or colleague who’d recently walked boldly through the perpetually unlocked door of my life with a soft cradle for my ego and big promises they never intended to keep. But this optimism about my personal and family life felt rooted in a tangible reality, even while other aspects of my life remain uncertain. I’m glad, ultimately, that I got to really sit in that feeling for a moment — appreciating my wife, my friends — before getting yanked back into a more compromised reality.
Reagan was president when I was born. The first day of a new Trump presidency has simply affirmed what has always been true, and has been especially felt by people who lack the privileges I’ve had in my life — that progress is not always linear, and that applies to our individual lives but also to politics and cultural change. Something good happening doesn’t mean we’ve figured out how to make things good forever and it’ll keep improving from here. It just means that something good happened.
Ultimately, we cannot count on anything but each other. The people who really know us and care for us. Our own communities, wherever they are.
It’s probably ultimately not objectively ethical for us to bring a child into a world with such a perilous future, but I knew that when we decided to do it and did it anyway. Maybe one day we’ll have to answer to that. For now, there’s nothing I’ve ever looked forward to with more hope than I am looking forward to seeing his face for the first time. A good man is hard to find, but I’m hoping really hard that we can create one.
Our landlord has been thus far uninspired to fix our window or the wire that fell from its apparent perch during the winds. The window sealing tape seems to be doing the trick. For now, at least.
If you’re looking for ways to help people impacted by the wildfires in LA, here are some resources for doing that.
Let me know in the comments how you’ve grappled with or think about climate change w/r/t having kids! Also you can let me know about anything else too. I am convinced that my wife’s pregnancy is making my period weird has this happened to anybody else
love this whole thing but mainly here to say shout out to my GIRL: the world’s craziest dog, Penn
she had a fantastic time
“ A good man is hard to find, but I’m hoping really hard that we can create one.” this is such a lovely turn of phrase. Nothing much to say but stay safe
I know some won’t find this comforting, but my partner reminded me of this and I found it helped: plenty of kids played in the mud, had friends, grew up and had full lives during the fall of Rome. There are heaps of times humanity might have opted not to have kids to spare them from misery, but here we all are anyway. If WWII had convinced people not to have kids, we wouldn’t have had so many of the the cool hippie environmentalists and scientists who helped stop acid rain. This gen is going to have weird fights we can’t imagine, but they’ll build something out of it and it won’t all be acid rain for them.