When in the course of caring for our kids, we renew and strengthen our bonds with our friends and our community, we may find it necessary to take time to rejoice in triumphs and remind ourselves that we will get better.

We hold these truths to be evident only upon becoming a mom – that all women are equal in feeling overwhelmed and exhilarated by motherhood and endowed by their Maker with certain rights, among them speaking up, reaching out, and pursuing a good night’s rest.

When we endure a long carpool line of abuses by small people who think they rule the world, it is our duty to ourselves to keep calm and stand our ground, patiently teaching our children when we want to pull out the last strands of hair we still have.  In order to keep calm, we need to pray and reach out to other adult humans.  We need each other to talk through our day, our week, our life!

We have suffered unusual and uncomfortable behavior distant from norms that we previously considered innate.  In response, we have said goodnight so many times that the last utterance was definitely by Darth Vader.  We have “warned” our children more times than pundits have predicted doom if a certain candidate becomes president.  We have given more last chances than Jesus, who lovingly still cannot believe that we let Andy have the second gummy bear.

And so we declare that we are both free and interdependent with our community to raise our children, because no person can raise a child alone.  We are free to choose our approaches and adjust them as reality dictates and we mature.  We are free to celebrate together, rejoicing in milestones that we have reached as a community and also by our own hard work.  We are free to let out our frustration in verbal ways that don’t sound like a screaming toddler.  We are free to hug our children and tell them how much we love them and how much they mean to us.  And we are interdependent with other parents to survive.  As my friend wrote in the brilliant guest post yesterday, parenting is really hard in ways that jolt you out of a feeling of mastery.  It is okay to need each other to get through it.

We ask God for inner strength and endurance, and for the courage to ask for help when we need it.  We ask God to help us love ourselves, the fantastic moms that we are.  We ask God to forgive us because we are imperfect.  We depend on God as our babies depend on us.  And we depend on the community God has placed in our lives, as varied and surprising as it may be.  We pledge our lives and our money and honor to each other in support of one another in hugs, in gifts, in acts of service, in words, in thoughts, and in our prayers.   Only in community with other caring people can we become the kind of human beings we want our children to emulate.

EVK