Parenting: An Act of Radical Hope

Raising children in our current moment is fraught with uncertainty – climate change, political unrest, societal challenges, socio economic instability – the list goes on. What’s more, the aforementioned issues don’t specifically reflect the practical, day to day challenges young families face – managing professional and familial obligations in an economy that demands our constant attention, exorbitant and unsubsidized childcare costs, lack of centralized community, defunded school districts and the intractability of the mental load.  

It’s understandable, and even judicious, for wise and self-aware folks to reconsider the imperative to have children. These concerns impact our emotional and psychological ability to imagine a future where our values and instincts might consistently align with our everyday lives. To merely say there’s a lot of fear grossly underscores reality. But here’s the thing – fear stifles our ability to actually listen to ourselves and decipher what we truly want, what we feel capable of, what we feel daring enough to dream. 

To have a child is to hope, at the quiet core of your being, that the world still holds promise. That men are redeemable, that we can learn to live with respect and gratitude for our planet, and that our children may act as beacons of light – shining their inherent goodness and promise out into the astronomic darkness. Children have a way of making our priorities abundantly clear, they reflect back to us the work we need to do as individuals and as a collective, and they remind us of what’s precious – that every single person on this earth, at one time, was someone’s tiny, helpless baby – worthy by virtue of their existence of love, tenderness and care. 

The late, great congressman John Lewis consistently and reverently cited the power of “love in action” and the discipline of believing in love as the most powerful force in the universe. To be a parent is to intimately know the discipline of love, the exhaustion of love, the hypocrisy of love, and to radically hope that we may fortify our children with enough of it to carry them forth beyond the scope of our dreams and imagination. When we can model for our children how to hold our fears in one hand and the radical discipline of hope in the other, when we can choose the life affirming power of love above all else, we may just be able to heal each other, and in so doing, ourselves.