What do you want to be if you grow up?

My son turned 9 months old last week. His favorite stuffy is a giraffe out of circulation. My husband and I found an eBay reseller and bought a couple extra giraffes just in case. Henry loves to climb (even if he’s a little too confident for his still unsteady legs). He mimics my laugh which only makes me laugh harder. He’s learning how to clap and high-five. Henry is the thing that makes me smile biggest every single day.

When I put him to bed at night, the second the door closes I turn to my husband and say, “I miss him.” I watch him on the monitor until I fall asleep.

My heartbeat is in sync with Henry’s. Thump, thump, thumping on the same wavelength. I feel his joy. I feel his curiosity. I feel his frustration. I feel his fear.

I picture all of the things he will do in life. A brainiac, or an artist, or an athlete. All of those things. This week, I pictured him with a bullet wound. I pictured him crying in a classroom bathroom as shots rang out down the hall. I pictured him hiding beneath a church pew. I pictured him being carted into an ER room.

At one point, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a mother. Part of the hesitation had to do with the particular phase of life I was in. But another part of me knew that becoming a mother meant a unique, exposed vulnerability. That vulnerability felt distant, undefined in its entirety, but I knew it was there. Even if I couldn’t nail down the emotion perfectly before, I knew parenthood meant creating something perfect, something pure, and then for the rest of your life, watching that perfection and love get chipped away at.

Even when my husband and I decided we wanted a child, I faced that anxiety. But a year ago, I had hope for a better world moving towards change. I didn’t want to discredit that future I felt beginning to form. It felt like the ultimate act of hope to bring new life into a world I viewed as just starting to turn the tide towards compassion and care. It felt good to say to my unborn child, “The world is still scary, but I think by the time you’re old enough, we will have figured some things out. It won’t be perfect but it will be better. I think it might even be good.”

That hope feels harder and harder to hold on to. In spite of that, I’m still glad Henry is here, of course. He is pure love incarnate. He represents the potential for better. I cling to my child the way I cling to hope.

But still…

I will have to teach my child love over hate. I will have to teach him curiosity over fear. Because the conditions he will grow up in will not reflect those principles by default.

I will teach him how best to hide. How to put pressure on a wound. How to stay quiet, undiscovered.

And then after I’ve taught him that he is not safe, I will dust off the vision of a better world that’s grown hard and stale within me and I will hand it to him.

Instead of the future I imagined, I will be handing him a burden. He will have to fix what we broke, what we failed to mend. He will have to tread the rising floodwaters of hate and vitriol and violence and greed.

And I can only hope the weight placed on his shoulders won’t break him like it has broken me.