Mothering through these times

tendrils of love and care stretching across time and space

As a sharp frost settled over the darkened street and the bare branches of Groot outside, I cuddled on the couch with my two younger boys, one on either side of me in their Christmas PJs, to read Grandpa Christmas¹. In this letter written long ago to his grandaughter Mia, now grown up and with children of her own, Grandpa wishes for “a new world, without war and waste, where children like you will be able to breathe in good clean air and drink from clear bright water”.

I say that I read Grandpa Christmas with them. But the truth is, I couldn't get past page 3. Throat swollen with tears which choked my voice and blurred my eyes, I had to ask E to take over with the reading.

Was it the memories of my own grandfather, who, as a subsistence farmer, tended to his own patch of earth through a lifetime of back-breaking work – a patch of earth where my mum still grows most of the vegetables she and my dad need? Was it the thought of all that we have already lost, of the irreparable damage we a…