By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

Sometimes the most miraculous moments of parenting happen in those late night hours when you wish your kids were asleep, but you are snuggled up beside them and they begin to speak.

A few months ago, as the leaves were just beginning to fall, I was lying with Isaac rubbing his back. The lights were off, but the moonlight was streaming through his window. Isaac is now ten years old. I don’t know if you remember fifth grade social studies, but this is the year when the curriculum teaches about “the founding of America.” And Isaac has been struggling. He is learning it in a very different context from our beloved Detroit to our new home in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

We had been quiet for quite some time and I wondered if he had fallen asleep, when suddenly he said, “I miss Detroit.”

“Yeah?” I said, “What are you missing?”

“I miss that it was an activist city. Sometimes I just feel like people don’t really care here. I don’t understand why all my classmates like Trump. They all talk about how great he is.”

“How do you respond when they talk about him?” I asked.

“I just ask ‘why?,’” he said. “Right now they all just say ‘because Biden sniffs babies.’ I think it is just a rumor.”

“That’s so strange. I don’t even know what that means.”

I keep scratching his back as the room grows quiet again for a few moments.

“Sometimes I feel like this is the end of the earth.”

I feel his words run through my whole body before I say, “Yeah, I have that feeling too sometimes. How does it make you feel?”

“Like what’s the point anymore?”

I pause giving space just to hold this deep grief he carried. And then I said, “I often go back and forth between both feeling those feelings of sadness and worry. And then other times, I think- what if we are so lucky to be alive right now? What if we get to be part of everything shifting? Of loving the earth and living in ways that put us deeper relationship with the earth.”

Then he said, “sometimes I wonder what it would be like if Europeans never came here. What would this land look like if the Indigenous folks still lived here.”

“What do you think it would be like?” I asked.

“So many more trees,” he said as if with his whole body.

“There is a lot of work happening all over right now called Land Bank. Folks are dreaming like you about what if we give this land back to Indigenous folks and let them lead the way into future. Teach us how to care for the land again.”

He interrupts, “So, they didn’t all get killed?” There is so much relief and possibility in his voice.

Oh, my sweet child. How could I not have been clear about that before? And also, how dare our systems of education teach about Indigenous folks purely in the past tense?

“No, not all of them were killed.” You could see his whole body relax a little. “So many were killed. And a lot of the Lenape folks in this place were pushed to Oklahoma and Canada. But some stayed here and went underground.” I went on to share bits about the relationships we are beginning to build with Lenape folks here and how we had been invited to a Pow Wow in a few weeks.

His eyes lit up, “I want to go!”

I rubbed his back until he fell asleep as he spooned his beloved dog, Cooper. I put my glasses back on and walked up the stairs speechless. I sat on the couch and tried to remember each word of that conversation as I shared it with Erinn. She listened with tears in her eyes.

The next morning, Erinn called me at work “I’ve been researching and there is a huge climate march in New York City next Saturday. I think I should take Isaac. I just want to let him see some hope.”

He was ecstatic as we pulled out poster board and markers. He put his drawing skills to use as he wrote out “Don’t be a fool. Stop using fossil fuels.”

Erinn and Isaac hopped on the train into the city and joined with hundreds of thousands of people calling for an end to fossil fuels.

And as they marched through the packed streets of New York City, five of us including Cedar, 7 years old, went into our small town of Stroudsburg with our homemade signs and stood on the corner. It was quickly clear that while Stroudsburg is a frequently touristed area by New Yorkers, no one expected or wanted to see a protest on the corner outside the Irish pub and the fancy hiking store.

Cedar walked up and down the busiest side of the street hoping to inspire a honk or two. His sign read “No Turtles Should be Extinct” with beautifully drawn sea turtles.

So often these kids have a way of naming and exposing the grief that is held in my body but has gone years without being named or articulated. Sometimes it is so simple. Why don’t people care? What if this the end? What is the point of going on? What if colonization had never been? What could have been?

May we all find space to name our grief and despair out loud as the moon rests on our face and a loving hand rubs our back. May we feel deeply and then find our way to the streets. May we tend community and love the trees. And perhaps we could all be a little more whole if we would scoop up the babies in our lives, give them a good “sniff,” and listen to their undeniable wisdom.

Lydia Wylie-Kellermann is the author of the soon to be released, This Sweet Earth: Walking with our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse (Broadleaf). She is the director of Kirkridge Retreat Center on Lenape land in Bangor, PA