I used to think hope was something you had to earn: proof things would turn out fine before you were allowed to feel okay about them. So when my anxiety about the world my kids are growing up in got loud, I didn’t reach for hope. I reached for control. More research. More doom-scrolling disguised as diligence, as if memorizing every wildfire statistic would somehow keep the world from catching fire.

Just curious, how are you parenting in this moment? What gives you hope for a better world for our children?

Then I talked to Kaitlyn Teer.

Kaitlyn is a senior editor at Cup of Jo and the author of Little Apocalypses, a book she wrote after becoming a mother turned her climate anxiety into something almost unbearable. What struck me wasn’t that she’d found a way to feel better. It’s that she’d found a way to stay honest about how bad things are and still choose hope, on purpose, not by accident.

Got someone who is a parent and has climate anxiety? Share this with them.

It’s what Krista Tippett calls “muscular hope,” and it’s the perfect description for what Kaitlyn’s doing in this book. Not the kind that looks away. The kind that’s done the math, read the statistics, felt the overwhelm, and decided to build something anyway.

I went in expecting to talk about dread. We did. But we landed somewhere I didn’t expect: a real answer to the question I ask myself most nights after I put my kids to bed: how do I stay present for both the disasters and the little joys of raising a human?

If you’ve ever needed permission to believe things might be okay, not naively, but on purpose, this one’s for you.

Follow Kaitlyn here, on Substack, and get a copy of her book Little Apocalypses - I promise, if you are a person who is thinking about the intersections of parenthood and climate change, you will feel seen and supported.

Sending love to all of you humans out there. Times are tight, but we are strong.

Love, Carissa

PS Bad at Keeping Secrets is something I do for fun, it is such a blessing to be able to share work that I wholeheartedly believe in. The podcast is edited by Mark McDonald, Music by my sister Officially Quigley and sponcered by People I’ve Loved (in the sense that we pay for it).

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