Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here—and you might notice that things look a little different than they did 9 months ago.
A lot can change in 9 months, can’t it?
Like it has been for so many people, in so many beautiful and terrible ways, 2020 has been a year of reckoning for me. Few things clarify our priorities and values as efficiently as crisis, and three fourths of a year through the crisis of COVID-19, I understand my values in a way that I didn’t at the end of 2019.
I value my loved ones more than I did a year ago: so far, my family and friends are all safe and healthy. We have been astonishingly lucky.
I value childcare more. (I imagine every parent of small children values childcare more.)
In their near-complete absence from my life over the last 9 months, I value hugs from friends, stranger’s faces, browsing through the library, access to public restrooms, and leisurely walks through the grocery store more than I ever imagined I would.
We value what we realize we cannot take for granted.
Time is a thing that many of us have realized we cannot take for granted. And not the sort of time you slog through when you’re stuck at home with children and no childcare for months, or the kind of time that drags on when you’ve been isolated for entire seasons with minimal social contact. I mean the kind of time that measures our chance to do what we’re meant to do with our lives. That kind of time isn’t a given.
A few months into lockdown (and a few months into a season of existential angst), there was a moment when I asked myself: am I really doing what I want to be doing with my life? Aside from the obvious nos (no, I do not wish to be interrupted with snack requests every 3 minutes, and no, I do not wish to have to wipe my kids’ butts during Zoom meetings), there was also a deeper no.
No. Something feels off about the path I’ve been carving for myself. It looks right on the outside, but it’s not quite right on the inside.
I’d been working in the field of integrative medicine in my day job for years, and working as a fertility coach on the side. I loved my colleagues, and I really, really loved my coaching clients. I’ve been a coach since 2011, and each client has felt like a gift: there are few things that feel more profound to me than witnessing the intimate, sometimes shadowy corners of someone else’s life. Given my own journey with infertility and pregnancy loss, working with people navigating their own fertility and loss journeys felt especially meaningful.
Yet more and more, I was hearing climate anxiety come up in conversations with clients. And more and more, I was experiencing climate anxiety myself. I’d been exploring a growing interest in climate change through taking classes and reading every book I could find on the subject. The more I learned, the more concerned I felt about the future my children–and my clients’ children–would inherit.
There was a gap between the work I was doing with clients and the world I wanted for all of our babies. There is the work of helping parents create the families of their dreams, and there is the work of making sure that the world will be a safe place for those families. Both vocations are necessary and sacred, and they’re not by any means mutually exclusive. But something told me I was focusing on the wrong side of this work.
I decided to end my fertility coaching practice, and to start focusing on climate coaching instead.
Climate coaching has emerged from a brilliant community of coaches in the United Kingdom as a new field, dedicated to helping individuals and organizations find their place in the climate movement. One of the things that drew me to climate coaching was how similar it felt, in many ways, to fertility coaching. There are strong parallels between navigating a challenging fertility journey and navigating what it means to be a parent in a changing climate: both involve entering wholly new territory and crossing a landscape that’s filled with hidden landmines of loss, anxiety, and grief. Both can involve making decisions you never thought you’d have to make. Both involve complicated relationships with hope.
It’s a gift to have the chance to realign our lives with our values.
So allow me to introduce myself, again: I’m Elizabeth, and I’m a climate coach who works with parents and future parents who are worried about climate change. I’m a mother of two and I’m fiercely devoted to the belief that there is still time to make the world is a safe place for our children. I help people find their place in the climate movement and cultivate joyful, climate conscious families.
I’m looking forward to getting to know you better.