“How do you avoid becoming a Doomsday mom?”

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I don’t even know where she heard it, but suddenly my daughter Belle (8) wanted to know if it was true that the Netherlands could flood. She was in the back of the car, we were on our way to her pony, and I took the opportunity to brush up on my teaching skills.

Below sea level

“Look, we live in the polder, which is below sea level”, I pointed to the grasslands around us. I tried to explain in jip-and-janneke something about pumping stations and reclamation and melting polar ice caps, but soon had to admit that once again I had not paid enough attention on this subject and that teaching is a profession. With a half-baked speech that, with a bit of luck, I had just gotten a 4 for, I told her that we do indeed have our house in risky territory. And that if something about global warming doesn’t happen soon, we’ll have to move to Africa – tact is, let’s say, not quite my cup of tea.

“If something is not done about global warming soon, we will have to move”

It was quiet behind me. In the distance I saw her pony standing in the meadow. “Look, there’s little Izzy. It’s already waiting for you”, I tried to change the subject. That turned out to be a wrong move. “So if it floods here, Izzy’s land will be flooded? Can horses actually swim?” Then again, I didn’t answer that inconsiderately. Horses can swim a bit, I think, but of course they won’t last an hour without solid ground under their hooves. I searched for the words to say this tactfully, but was overtaken by my daughter’s conclusion. “Mommy, I don’t want Izzy to die!”

That night the real chaos broke out, around bedtime of course – the best time for drama. Belle didn’t want to die, Izzy couldn’t die either and she certainly didn’t want to move to Africa. I put our baby to bed one floor up while my friend listened to the story in Belle’s bedroom and then tried to reassure her. “What have you told her”, he hissed angrily, when I stuck my head around the corner of her room door to take a closer look. I really should have handled this differently.

Doomsday Mother

I don’t want to become a doomsday mom, with a bomb shelter full of canned food, flashlights, batteries and perpetual drinking water, but I find myself getting more and more gloomy about the world.

This week I saw images on the news of a Ukrainian flat or better: of what was left of it. A rocket hit had torn open the building and through the gaping hole you could see a bright yellow kitchen where the apples were still lying on the fruit bowl, so surreal.

Then a video was shown, recorded in the same kitchen. A father, a mother and children celebrated a birthday there smiling and cheerful. The father did not survive the rocket attack, the correspondent said.

The future

“Incredible. So this all happens when we speak two thousand miles away. Can you imagine something about it?” I asked my daughter Floortje (18). She glanced at the television and shook her head. No, she couldn’t. “Mom, can I borrow a car tomorrow? I have exams and the buses are on strike again. Really bloody irritating.”

“The future is something for old people, for boomers and so on”

Well, a bus strike like that puts a rocket attack into perspective, I thought cynically. Because where Belle is relatively easy to get into a blind panic, Floor has the typical adolescent immortality factor. Nothing can happen to her. The future is something for old people, for boomers and all that. She lives wonderfully in the here and now, just like my eldest son, who is 21, by the way. I asked him if he would join the fight if war broke out in the Netherlands. “Yeah right. Seems cool to me”, was his deadly serious answer – a side effect of too much Call of Duty play, I think.

Read also – ‘Shooting games are prohibited. And chatting online is out of the question’ >

Worry about the world

I vaguely remember my parents expressing their concerns about the world out loud. I understood very little about that at the time. After the Second World War, everything was fine again, wasn’t it? Well how much worse do you want it to be? And now I’m one of those moms who follows the news closely and has hours of, rather morose, conversations with her boyfriend about what’s hanging over us all.

When Floor takes a generous twenty minutes in the shower again, we point out to her that it is better for everything and everyone that she washes out the shampoo in five minutes. That invariably leads us to an annoyed “Yeah!” to stand. My friend can really explode over that. “Hey, we don’t just ask this kind of thing for our bills, but also for your future, right?” he then shouts.

It doesn’t land. They think influencers who fly around the world with private jets are cool or cool or fierce or sick, while I label them as super anti-social. “You don’t understand, mom”, I am told. “No, just wait until you all live in Africa and Waverveen can only be found in the history books”, I retort. I am not allowed to shout the latter too loudly in the vicinity of Belle, because she actually suffered a minor trauma from my speech.

Extreme weather

We recently came back from winter sports and had rather strong wind and rain saturated the outside wall of our house. Add to that a construction flaw and half the living room was flooded. That was whining again. “Can this flood get any worse? What if it starts raining again? Can it also come into my bedroom? I find it so scary!” she wailed for several minutes, while the rest of us tried to get everything dry again with towels, buckets and mops.

“You will see extreme weather more and more often”, my son said to his sister. “The fact that we barely had snow on the first day in Austria is also due to global warming,” he continued. I motioned for him to shut up. We had just completed a thousand-mile car ride and I couldn’t take Belle’s nervous breakdown in addition to all the water damage. But it was already too late.

Doom thinking

That night, kneeling beside her bed, I tried to tone down the seriousness of the situation, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her it’s all going to be okay, because it’s not. Our children are going to get an awful lot for their choosing. I am now 45 and perhaps that age also plays an important role in my melancholy in this area.

“How fair is it that this girl has to deal with the mess we all made?”

Our youngest just turned one. When I look at that innocent face, I sometimes wonder what we’ve gotten ourselves into. How fair is it that this girl has to deal with the mess we’ve all made of the world here?

“Shouldn’t we just move to the other side of the country? Our house may be worth nothing in forty years’ time”, I have already suggested to my friend. And then hearing myself doom and gloom like that out loud only makes me more miserable. It’s all so uncertain and shadowy. Because where one moment the world can fall apart at any moment, the next moment another message comes out from which that little bit of much-needed hope can be drawn.

Also read – Environmental Freaks: ‘We don’t have a car and we never will’ >

Honesty

Singer Jaap Reesema wrote the song My little president, about the questions of a child and the parent who does not tell everything. Because why do people sleep on the street? And who rules the world? Why is that girl without parents crying like that?

I won’t tell you everything
no, not yet
because then you stay a little longer
so sweet

I won’t tell you everything
no, not yet
because then you stay a little longer
so naive

Of course you want to be honest with your children somewhere, but to what extent and from what age can they handle that honesty? I often can’t even handle it. Then I turn off the radio or TV, then I scroll to a new message on Twitter or then I don’t read the newspaper for a day. The problems are too big and often too complex.

An influencer in a private jet is pretty crazy, but it’s nothing at the bottom when you compare it to the pollution from heavy industry. There is great profit to be made. Quite apart from what that does for the earth; that also makes people sick and dead. Humans are just crazy destructive and I really don’t know if a group of idealists will ever change that.

“I don’t want to be a doomsday mom, so I often bury my head in the sand”

I don’t want to be a doomsday mom, so I often bury my head in the sand. There is a solution for everything, right? And if man doesn’t do it, nature will fix it – albeit with a slightly harder and more rigorous hand.

Protect against everything

“Can corona come again sometime?” This question also came from Belle, she likes to checkmate you with heavy conversations. “It could be much worse. There was once the Spanish flu, which killed 100 million people,” my friend said, followed by: “Dad’s great-grandfather too.” This time it was my turn to give him a death glare. That night, the Spanish Flu was the Dramatic Bedtime topic, complete with tears. I didn’t expect otherwise.

“If only I could protect my children from everything. But if I do that, I will take away from them the most beautiful thing they have.”

“I’d like to put you in a box”, sang Donald Jones in 1959. The lyrics, of course, came from Annie MG Schmidt and I think it regularly when I look at my children. If only I could protect them from everything. But if I do that, if I treat them like this and raise them from fear, I will deprive them of the most beautiful thing they have: open-mindedness and freedom.

Let them think as much as possible that their future is a pony camp, that everything will be fine or not too bad and let me watch from the sidelines and shiver. Even with that attitude, I, just like their father, will sometimes escape a spontaneous sketch of the horrible reality. And then in about forty or fifty years it will be their job to take over the doom thinking of our parents. Then I’m probably safe in a box by now.

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