I went to Mass last night by myself. This doesn’t happen too often, but I enjoy it when it does.
I knelt in the pew in the minutes before Mass started, and I bowed my head. I prayed that I could be a good role model for my girls. I prayed for their safety. I prayed desperately and fervently for help in keeping the anxiety away this week.
“Please God,” I asked, “let me have a strong week.”
And I needed those prayers. I need help having the strength.
And if you read this blog, you probably know that I fail at this a lot, and I get quite crazed over things that perhaps may not matter so much in the long run. I worry about frazzled mornings and messed up bedtime routines. I obsess over number of pages read and participation in art projects in pre-school.
I think about and pray about and obsess about ordinary things that ordinary people think and pray and obsess about.
My kids mean the world to me. I plead for their protection.
But sometimes we get a glimpse of what a luxury these prayers are. Because while we are praying about spelling tests and snow days, there are other mamas out there praying for much more.
There are other mamas pleading desperately safety. For healing. For protection. Prayers from mamas who love their babies every single bit as much as I love mine but mamas who don’t have the luxury of worrying about laundry because they have a baby in a war zone or an operating room or in hospice care.
I think we all face our challenges in life. It’s a roller coaster of sorts. We all have our moments of peace and our moments of struggle. None of us come out unscathed.
But I hope I am able to never forget that for every giggle my daughters prompt out of me, another mama’s tear is dropping and another is dropping to her knees, pleading for the life of her child.
Most of us are lucky. Many of us will never have to fear the dark of an emergency room with a frightfully ill child. Many of us will never have to look into the cavern of “what if” and not know how we will climb out should the worst come to fruition.
I am not sure if there is a single experience more terrifying than being a mother. Because to be a mother means that the largest, most important part of your heart is forever connected to the well being of another. Every time you give birth, you take a piece of your heart and you put it in the tiny hands of another, and you pray that they and God take care of it and protect it because without it, you will never be whole again.
To love with abandon is to risk it all.
And none of us knows how the journey will end. None of us knows if our days of petty prayers are about to come to an abrupt end.
It’s all an unknown.
And it is because of that, if for no other or grander purpose, we must find a way to hold those others in our circle. To pray for them. To hold space for them. To not shy away.
Because to look at our nightmares is scary. But to abandon our prayers because of them is far worse.