My new assistant.

You probably didn't come here to read about babies, but hear me out.

The last in-person interview I did before the pandemic was January 31, 2020 at the end of a week in the Central Valley reporting on groundwater and state regulations. We weren't in a drought then, but I spoke to people across Fresno and Tulare counties whose wells were running dry all the same. That week I began having an early miscarriage. I kept reporting through the blood and the pain, alone. By all other measures it was a successful reporting trip.

A month and a half later, I found out I was pregnant again, the same week California shut down. Between the recent miscarriage and the pandemic, I spent no effort to plan for what my life as a parent might look like – I lived one day at a time through a slow rolling crisis. I scrambled to turn out "novel coronavirus" news and save as much money as I could, certain I would be laid off – which I was, by June. At nearly five months pregnant, I didn't bother applying for new jobs. At seven months pregnant, I watched California survive its worst fire season on record. I had Nico at the cresting height of the first wave in November. A few friends and relatives came to meet him from several feet away on our front porch.

Without nearby family help or childcare, we muddled through the next several months. By spring, "sleep when the baby sleeps" became work when the baby sleeps. In September, I drove down to Fresno again for the first time in over a year and a half, the Valley now in full-blown drought, to report a new story for Wired. I pumped in between interviews in my car. In November Nico turned 1; we got part-time childcare; I filed the story.

It wasn't until this year that I started to think about how I might try to live my new life now. I thought I would parent as an employed person with a predictable salary and healthcare. I had postponed having a child for years because of financial and climate anxiety; having at least the one taken care of made me feel like I could grapple with the other. I joke sometimes about raising another soldier for the water wars, but I can't exactly name for you the feelings I felt watching the fires burn in early fall 2020, while still quarantined at home – I don't know that I allowed myself to really feel them.

This is all background, but important, I think, to understand how I come to my work differently now than I might have in January 2020. By all measures, things are objectively worse. But I haven't felt this hopeful in years. We fight, we adapt. Climate nihilism feels short-sighted and self-indulgent now. Maybe you would say the same of having children. Maybe you would be right.

Next week Nico turns 2. I recently took him on a reporting trip to Malibu, where my mom and my brother played with him while I interviewed survivors of the 2018 Woolsey fire that burned across west LA County the same day as Paradise. It was a more limiting and tiring reporting trip than one I might've taken in January 2020. But we adapt.

The plans I am making now aren't the ones I thought I'd make, and the work I'm doing isn't the stuff I thought I'd need in order to best support a child. I am writing a book, for Random House, about the past, present and future of California. Nico is usually in daycare, except when he may be accompanying me on future trips. We are figuring it out, my new assistant and I. We're adapting.

More TK.