What My Kid is Teaching Me About Fear and Faith
Reflections from the terrifying and grounding practice of writing to my kid.
(Side note: I use the word ‘faith’ over ‘hope’ intentionally. Here’s why.)
I’ve been writing to my kid.
Plot twist: I don’t have a kid.
Context: I love kids. Mothering as a verb is not new to me. Being an aunty / chithi / masi / khala is one of my favorite blessings. A younger version of me had no problem imagining having my own. Somewhere between then and now, a deep fear of having and raising my own children settled in my being. In this moment, spiritually, I am open to that which wants to come through me. Physically and emotionally, my body and heart already FEEL like they’re already carrying something that is becoming. And mentally, no part of it makes any sense and I can’t reconcile it logically, materially, and/or gestures-broadly-at-the-world-ally.
So anyway, I’ve been writing to my kid.
They initiated the conversation.
They dropped in one day earlier this year and made it clear that I needed to start a journal where I was in conversation with them.
I resisted. They ignored my resistance and flooded me with things I needed to capture in this journal. “It’s cute that you think this is optional, but anyway, you gotta write about x, y, z.” Intrusive as they were, I was both intrigued and overwhelmed by their clarity.
Of course MY kid would come out of left field - with an intensity that is both on-brand yet somehow also unexpected - and assign me a project upon first meeting (mars in scorpio, venus in virgo, if that means anything to ya).
The desire to honor what felt akin to a creative impulse meant I gave in and started the journal.
You see, my relationship to writing - my most consistent expression of creativity - is one of faith. Faith, for me, is “the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see.” (adrienne maree brown) I have so much trust in the practice of writing that I will follow the impulse, water the seed, and give it as much time, space and energy as it needs to become what it wants to become.
That said, the hesitation around the form factor of ‘child,’ after many years of resisting it, meant that the first words I penned in the journal were “dear wombship.” Opening a conversation with that which wants to come through me, without becoming attached to its form factor. (Not long after that first drop-in, my kid revealed their name, and I’ve been referring to them by it ever since.)
You see, my relationship to having and raising children has been one of fear. Fear of being consumed, fear of becoming someone I don’t recognize and/or respect in the name of parenting, fear of abandoning the children of the world to focus on the one(s) that came out of me, fear of bringing someone into a world that isn’t ready to hold/receive them, fear of needing to live longer than I would otherwise choose, fear of a job whose contract never ends, fear of buying into a lifestyle that is much more comfortable than I have ever needed in order to feel like I’m giving my kid what they need to thrive. The list goes on.
Amidst this barricade of fears, my kid found a loophole in order to make themselves known. They came to me in the form of a creative impulse. Fear wrapped up in faith.
What started off feeling like my system was being hijacked by a stranger, has since become the practice that is sustaining me through one of the most exhausting seasons that I’ve experienced to date.
Writing to my kid has helped me see that fear and faith are both “the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see.”
Faith is the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see that serve our highest good.
Fear is the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see that may cause danger, pain, and/or harm.
“Practice is your center. What do you do repeatedly because it’s life-giving? And what can you offer from that place?”
Sendolo Diaminah
// Writing to my kid is life-giving because I trust them. I’ve always said that my favorite people to hang with are babies and elders, because they’re the closest to source. The former just came from source and the latter is on their way back to source. I trust them because they move with an honesty that comes in part from having the fewest fucks to give. The babies have yet to be conditioned by the systems that be, and the elders have often lived enough life to see through them.
// Writing to my kid is life-giving because I’m not yet angry with them, and they’re not yet angry with me. Our conversations are shaped by the grace, gentleness, and generosity we hold towards our babies, towards beings not yet born.
Meanwhile, much of the writing with movement spaces is an exercise in condemning and/or critiquing our opponent or our own. Rage protects that which we love, and it can be energizing and empowering to defend what matters to us. And, it takes a lot of energy to be constantly defending, anticipating attack or opposition, and justifying one’s stance.
My kid, on the other hand, just wants to know two things: the truth / an explanation of what is, and why it is that way. When I am in conversation with them, I’m not writing to defend. I’m writing to teach and be taught, to understand and be understood, to receive and be received. Their questions don’t feel like threats or annoyances, but like a genuine expression of their desire to understand. Writing to them means I’m questioning the fundamentals, without feeling the fear of the ground falling out from under me and being vulnerable to attack when it does. Writing to them is a practice that has humility built into it. They don’t need me to know everything, they need me to be invested in figuring it out with them.
“...a child reminds you of all those things that a world that is just based on production does not value. An imagination. What you can’t see. What seems like aimless time, just wandering around. When I’m trying to get somewhere with my daughter, I have to realize that she has no concept of time. It’s just what interests her, what moves her, what excites her, what frustrates her, what feels tragic in the moment. There’s no “I gotta get here by 9 o’clock.” It doesn’t matter....You realize that there’s another dimension, that there’s another way to be in our lives when you know a child. You can be much more motivated by interest, by awe, by wonder.”
Prentis Hemphill
// Writing to my kid is life-giving because they are the most dignified person I’ve gotten to know. Their sense of worth or value isn’t contingent upon me being ready to receive them. They are not threatened by my fear of them and/or what they represent. They are worthy, because they are. They are of value, because they are. They are teaching me who they are, what they need from me, and what they need from the people and world around me, in order to come earth-side. One of the first asks they made of me was around fear:
Mama,
Don’t motivate me using fear, tell me the truth. Even if it means telling me that you’re scared, you don’t know, you’re tired, or you’re sad. If you have to move past your own fear to access the truth, then do that work, and then tell me the truth. I am borne of love and truth coming together - I have the capacity to hold truth delivered with love and love delivered with truth. I don’t need you to be infallible for me, I need you to be honest with me. Power as we are seeing it in this moment is usually unprocessed fear in action. Process your fear so that the power you wield as it relates to me is love - not fear - in action.
[Kid’s name]
// Writing to my kid is life-giving because they are forcing me to confront not only my stories of fear, but the way those stories have become stored in my cells, bones, and blood.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), emotions are energy in motion and the natural movement of fear is downward, conserving, and deeply rooted. Fear is meant to activate caution, and then settle. Fear is not meant to always resolve. We are meant to experience and store some levels of fear as a means of protecting ourselves from very real threats. Fear is stored in the kidneys, which also houses our Jing. Our Jing is our essence. It can be understood as our constitutional blueprint — the intelligence we are born with that governs fertility, growth, aging, regeneration, and reproductive capacity. Jing is closely related to marrow, DNA, ancestry, and the deepest reserves of the body. Jing provides the foundation from which all other substances (i.e. blood, tissue, fluids) arise. I repeat, Jing and fear are housed in the same place within our bodies.
In a pathological condition, this unprocessed fear can show up physically as lower back pain, premature aging, exhaustion, and adrenal burnout, and emotionally as anxiety, panic, and insomnia.
Fear, in a pathological condition, strongly depletes our Jing and consumes our essence - i.e. who we are at our core. What we are most afraid of wraps itself around what makes us who we are. This makes it harder for us to access our essence, because our fear becomes wrapped up with our essence, and accessing that fear feels like the scariest thing in the world. Our body wants to protect us from moving that fear, and we would sooner cut ourselves off from accessing our essence than touch that fear.
Emotions are meant to move through our bodies vs. become a part of them, and all emotional storages come from a momentary need for survival. That said, fear runs much deeper than other emotions and is only stored in situations of (real or perceived) life and death.
As a woman, unprocessed grief has been socially much easier for me to access than unprocessed rage. As a human, however, both grief and rage have been physiologically easier to access than unprocessed fear. And that fear is what my kid is asking me to tap into and move. The process of bringing life into this world requires Jing, it requires our constitutional blueprint, and if mine is wrapped up in fear, my kid is asking me to not pass it down.
“You will be turned inside out…You will think, believe you cannot go on. You will realize that if you ever thought that facing yourself, the bloody, ugly, sublime truth of yourself was the ultimate responsibility, you were wrong. It is to face yourself and realize you cannot run away because another life, your child’s, depends on this ultimate self-encounter.
Welcome to mamahood.
I am trying to articulate the blood and muscle, the tears, the shaking, how it is no longer really a choice, of whether or not you will have the courage to not run away from your own fear, panic, lack of self-control. It is something beyond and before courage. It is a visceral sense that vulnerable, quivering life is breaking you and you have to let it.
Mai’a Williams, Revolutionary Mothering
A few years ago, I experienced one of my worst fears coming true. It destroyed me in ways that felt unrecoverable in the moment, and it felt like being burned alive in my core. Constitutionally on fire. What emerged on the other side, however, was someone that those closest to me described both as “a whole new person” and “so much more yourself.” Internally, I felt so much lighter, younger, and more energized than I had felt while (subconsciously) holding that fear. My creativity went through the roof - I wrote a book, designed an exhibit, did a performance, took up tango, took voice lessons, became a celebrant, etc. If our Jing governs fertility, aging, growth, regeneration, and reproductive capacity, and our Jing and fear are both stored in the kidneys, then it makes sense that releasing and moving that fear felt initially like dying and then like returning to my natural state - the original pre-fear blueprint.
I’ve named fears in the past, but I’m realizing just how unfamiliar I am to actually FEELING fear. In TCM, the way to access and start to pull back on stored fear is through stillness, immense safety, and rebuilding the matter (i.e. blood, fluids, tissue) that our bodies need to sustain life. We are not trying to release anything, rather we are creating the conditions where the body no longer needs to hold that fear in storage. We cannot move fear from a place of depletion or unsafety. The movements that are recommended for signaling this safety are bone breathing and still, grounding postures. Feeling down to the marrow of our bones, and breathing into our very depths.
For me, the somatics of fear have felt so different from the somatics of grief or rage. I can usually feel the wave of grief swelling within me before it crashes, just as I can feel the fire of rage bubbling before it rises. There is usually a runway, and neither of these emotions moves through me particularly quickly. Meanwhile, fear feels so much more sudden. It’s a sudden burst of gasping tears - often provoked by a trigger I can’t see coming - followed by a shudder, and then it’s gone. As the body then reorganizes itself to fill the space that once held the fear, grief takes over, allowing the body to feel and move through what it cost the body to hold that fear for as long as it did.
This last season in particular has felt both deeply regulating and incredibly exhausting. More often than not, my nervous system feels settled, and I’m bone-tired. It has been a season of responding to “how are you?” with “exhausted” and “why, what’s going on?” with “literally nothing, nothing is going on, existing is exhausting.” I’m realizing now that this is the contradiction that exists at the precipice of moving stored fear. There is enough safety internally and externally for the fear to be moved out of storage and through and out of my body, yet the closer I get to accessing that fear, the more my body feels like it’s under existential threat, and the harder it has to work to stop me from accessing it. Ironically, as safety increases, so do fear’s defenses, alongside the exhaustion of keeping them up. This positive feedback loop breaks, and the fear is able to be moved, when the safety exhausts the defenses. The practice of writing to my kid has helped generate the conditions where safety is exhausting the defenses, more and more, slowly but surely. It’s terrifying and grounding all at once. And a lot of it is invisible work - something we cannot yet see.
// Writing to my kid is life-giving because I’ve come to realize that they’re not just my kid. My response to “What’s Temwa’s love story?” has always been “Temwa’s love story is the people’s love story,” even before I was able to articulate it in those words. Likewise, my kid is teaching me that they are the people’s kid, that they have to be. That they may come through me, but they will be nurtured, shaped, and held by many, just as they will nurture, shape, and hold many outside of me. As Kristen Martin writes in her article, For the Children: Can family abolitionists and activists against family policing work together?:
“For Lewis, family “is the name we use for the fact that care is privatized in our society,” a situation that creates “property rights” for parents over children “but also quasi-exclusive accountability for a child’s life - a situation that she argues is bad for children and parents both. Her vision is for “a world in which all people are cared for by many by default,” a post-family world in which it is not biology or law but comradeship that binds us. Lane-McKinley similarly bemoans that “so long as there is private property, childhood must be defined and limited by it, and we are left to speculate on what else childhood could be.”
As grandiose and utopic as this idea may sound (and has definitely sounded to me) in the era of the nuclear family, my kid needs me to see it as an inevitability. My job is not to question the premise, but to ask myself, “Who do I need to become, and what do I need to learn and unlearn, in order for them to become and be the people’s kid?”
// Writing to my kid is life-giving, because in writing to them, I’m writing to all kids, and to the kids within each of us. Just as my kid is the people’s kid, the people’s kids are also mine.
I’ve struggled to reconcile the speed at which James Baldwin’s “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe” quote is invoked in crises that impact children (i.e. all of them), with our collective inertia when it comes to actually acting like it. If all the kids are our kids, and this is what we allow to happen to them, are any of us truly fit to be parents, of our own or anyone else’s kids? The systems that be have in turn taken this insecurity (i.e. am I a good parent?) that they themselves had a hand in manufacturing, and channeled it into individual quests for perfectionism (i.e. there is a ‘best’ way to be a parent, and this is how you do it). This in turn makes it harder to see the nuclear family for the tool of counterinsurgency that it is. We are so busy and exhausted with trying to raise and shape lives that are meant to be raised and shaped by many hands, and trying to get it perfect at that, that we often have no spoons left for seeing, much less dismantling, these systems that both “dehumanize children and normalize hatred towards them because they are people with high care needs” (Rania El-Mugammar) and commodify that care for profit.
In truth, parenting is not a code to crack, as is often sold to us, but a practice of becoming alongside something or someone that came through us. We are supposed to come undone, but in a way that brings us closer to life, not death.
Amidst fears that having a kid will isolate me from parts of myself, what I care about, and the world, writing to my kid has actually facilitated the opposite. They’ve not taken me away from any of these things, rather they’ve become a key stakeholder in these conversations. I cannot claim to trust them, to value their perspective, if I’m not active in the practice of asking them, listening to them and letting them meaningfully shape their own, my, and our collective becoming.
Writing to my kid is a reminder of what James Baldwin shares in The Devil Finds Work,
“There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.”
In a tribute to Baldwin, author Prentis Hemphill shares,
“I think every so-called solution that we might arrive at seems like it will emerge from what Baldwin said - from that kind of love of the child, of the future. The kind of love that has us center them, has us restructure everything around them. That kind of love that says that they are an answer to a question that we’re asking. That they deserve our attention. That they deserve our care. And that anyone, and any entity that would treat a child this way, that would meet the beauty of a child’s life with violence or abuse, must be stopped, by us.”
^I read every “our” in this quote as the collective, not just a child’s biological or adopted parents.
// Fear, Faith & The Future
Both fear and faith are in relationship with the future. To me, the future is that which is becoming. We can orient to that which is becoming through the lens of fear and/or faith.
Prentis Hemphill equates the practice of nurturing a child to that of nurturing a future. They describe the practice of nurturing a child’s becoming as an act of faith.
“...Being able to see outside of our individual selves. Our individual lives. Because what a child compels you to do, is create. What a child compels you to do is nurture. To plant a seed. To think about what will grow beyond your life. There’s a generosity in that kind of relationship. That kind of intergenerational relationship is all strung together by generosity. By thinking about planting something, thinking about involving yourself in a future through nurturing, through love. I don’t know what will come, I don’t see what will come, but if I love you, if I hold you, if I look into your eyes, if I feed you, if I protect you, there is possibility.”
…But if we don’t have an orientation to children, I think we’ve lost an orientation to the future. We’ve gotten so navel-gazing, so solipsistic, so focused on ourselves and our greed and our domination, and ultimately our small, little lives that we’ve forgotten that core of generosity. We’ve forgotten that core of faith. It’s not even hope, you have faith...you pour into a child because you have faith.”
Technically, I have a graduate degree in strategic foresight. In reality, I have a deep aversion to the title of “futurist,” I can’t remember the last time I used any of the foresight tools or frameworks I learned in school for anything meaningful, and every time I hear someone say they do “futures work,” a part of me wants to respond with “yea, and I breathe.” It ultimately feels like we made a simple, universal thing “complex,” scarce, and elitist so that we could develop an industry around navigating the “complexity,” accessing the rarity, and striving for credibility. As we do in late-stage capitalism.
(^complex is in quotes because I’m referring to a specific kind of complexity that is deliberately engineered to be talked about, convened over, and unpacked indefinitely, but never materially acted upon.)
Yes, we as beings are complex.
Yes, the systems we inhabit are intricate.
Yes, our futures are shaped by a trillion different interactions happening in a million different places.
And our ability to engage with all of the above is in-built.
It needs to be re-membered, right-sized, and practiced, not bought, sold, performed, and/or justified.
Earlier this week, I came across an essay by Jasmine Bina that reminded me of what drew me to foresight as a practice in the first place. She writes:
“If you want to know what world lies ahead, do not look outward into technologies, headlines and passing trends. Look inward to where we are feeling something we cannot yet name.
All of us who are in the business of deciphering the future do the same thing. We make ourselves sensitive enough to feel the invisible energy in the air, and we give it language.
But that’s a really hard thing to do. Anyone who does this knows what it takes to give an invisible energy words. It feels like a small knowing that turns into a pull. That pull turns into its own gravity, and as it gets stronger it reorganizes your entire mental map around it. And as all of this pressure builds up inside your body, you struggle to name what the black hole at the center of it all is. It’s as far as a universe you’ve never been to, and as close as a word on the tip of your tongue.”
The practice of writing to my kid has felt like all of the above.
» Looking inward to where I am feeling something I cannot yet name.
» Making myself sensitive enough to feel the invisible energy in the air, and giving it language.
» Reorganizing my entire mental map around it.
» Making sense of something that is indeed as far as a universe I’ve never been to, and as close as a word on the tip of my tongue.
Bina also speaks to the courage (i.e. persistence despite fear) that this work requires of us:
“It’s misguided to think the future is somewhere ahead of us. It’s already inside us, distributed across millions of people who are feeling the same unnamed thing at the same time. Strategy, leadership, futurism are all, at their highest form, the same skill. They are the willingness to listen to that field, and have the nerve to translate it before it becomes obvious.
That’s why this work takes guts.
It requires that you take in all kinds of inputs you don’t always understand, to feel your way through them just as much as you think your way through them, and most crucially, to constantly be reorganizing your ideas around things that at best feel vague. And then of course, you have to have the guts to name it out loud.”
This practice of reorganizing our lives around things that at best feel vague, around inputs that we don’t always understand, as Bina describes, reminds me of Christelle Ambr’s description of quantum leaping.
“Quantum field - the underlying field of potential where all potential states of reality exist before they are observed or experienced.
Quantum leap - a sudden shift from one state to another without moving through every incremental step in between.
Now the part people distort:
This isn’t magic. It’s identity and behavior catching up fast.
You don’t become “Version B” by waiting to feel like her. You become her by acting from her standards while still feeling like Version A.
That tension is the work.
Version A:
Makes decisions based on current evidence
Waits for certainty
Reinforces the same identity
Version B
Decides based on where she’s going, not where she is
Moves before it feels natural
Holds standards that her current reality doesn’t yet justify
So the “quantum leap” is not instant transformation. It’s identity override.
You are still Version A internally, but:
You choose differently.
You tolerate discomfort.
You stop negotiating with old patterns.
Do that consistently, and reality reorganizes to match. Not because you “manifested” out of nowhere, but because you stopped feeding the timeline you say you want to leave.”
(^While Ambr’s description of quantum leaping speaks more to individual identity and behavior, I also see its relevance in shifting collective identity and behavior, in the practice of hospicing World A and bringing forth World B (or C, D, etc.) through acting by its standards and living as though it is already here.)
I think the work of bringing life - in all its forms - into this world happens through the practice of quantum leaping. I think mothering - in all its forms - is a practice of quantum leaping.
Writing to my kid, too, has asked me to engage in the practice of quantum leaping.
To move before / without certainty, but after / with knowing (i.e. the feeling of something we cannot yet name).
To tolerate the discomfort of moving before it feels natural.
To move in ways that “aren’t like me,” but feel aligned with who I need / want to become for the life that is ready to come through me - whether that’s a kid, a project, an event, or an idea.
In a world where our ability to value something is attached to our ability to measure it, what does success look like in this work of following the invisible energy that becomes a pull, this work of acting from Version B’s standards while we are still Version A internally? Bina describes her metric, which also happens to be one of mine, in this work:
“…there’s one simple heuristic that always tells me when I’ve gotten it right.
The only feedback that matters is when people say to me, “You just named something I didn’t know I was feeling.”...That’s when I know I’m tapping into the future.
People have an instinct for what’s coming because we are creating it from the inside out. But they have a really hard time accessing it. When you help them do that, it feels like a tremendous relief. And they will thank you for it.”
Whether it be through my work with Dismantling the Master’s Tools or in conversations with friends and strangers alike, this is a piece of feedback that I receive often - one whose frequency never impacts its novelty.
The practice of writing to my kid, however, offers this gift back to me.
It helps me name things I didn’t know I was feeling.
It offers me tremendous relief.
And I am immensely grateful to them for it.
Fear and faith are both the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see.
The former foregrounds realities that may cause us danger, pain, or harm. And the latter foregrounds realities that serve our highest good.
Neither fear nor faith stop the becoming, neither fear nor faith stop the future from unfolding, but both have the potential to shape it.
Earlier this month, I texted a friend while teetering somewhere in-between fear and faith:
“I feel like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and taking one last look back to make sure - anything else I need to know?” I asked.
They replied, “I think the only thing is to pray on it first and then do it, with the full and complete faith that whatever happens next is in your best interest. And don’t do it before you have that complete faith.”
As I asked myself how I’d know when I had complete faith, I thought of my kid immediately. I have complete faith in them, in their becoming, whatever form that may take.
The practice of writing to my kid is drawing me closer and closer to complete faith, to the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see - realities that serve my and our highest good.
It reminds me that what’s for us will never pass us by.
That what’s for us will be on time, but never on demand.
p.s. This piece, titled Maktūb مَكْتُوب: What Is Yours Will Always Find You, is one I’ve come back to often over the course of writing this essay, as a source of strength, clarity, and admittedly also in an attempt to integrate it somehow. But, some works are more companions than components, and are best positioned standing next to us in their fullness vs. integrated within us in pieces. This essay, I’ve come to realize, is the latter.
p.p.s. To mothers / parents of 3D children: I know that writing to a kid is not the same as having and raising one in the flesh. My intention here is not to conflate these labors, or to romanticize the latter. For me, love is a practice - something we do over and over because it’s (ultimately) life-giving. And for me, the practice of writing to my kid feels like tending the 3D soil of my body, and disarming the 4D pest control of my mind, so that the life that has made itself known to me in the 5D has what it needs to sprout and become in the 3D, should it choose to. (If I’ve lost you, I was supposed to. Maktūb.)
Related Essays
This sparked so much in me, in my own becoming. I loved the gentle nod to the 5th house as well as the parallels of fear and faith. This reminds me of a practice I've been employing lately where I am faced with a decision (to respond to someone, to take any next step). I step outside myself, and I look at myself from a distance. I look at her with unconditional love and understanding of what she has within her and ask, "What is the best course of action for her, no matter how uncomfortable it is?" What you wrote reminds me of this exactly. Thank you for this timely curation!