Parenting is very hard. Keeping your kids safe. Keeping them fed. Keeping them in the best schools, making sure they get good grades in those schools. We have to do all this as we navigate a world where Murphy’s Law is real, where bills have to get paid, where we have our own crap to deal with that no one is going to handle for us.
In that sense, parenting is an impossible job with impossible expectations. Yet in another, very real sense, being a parent is actually about the easiest job in the world. Because what do they really need? What is really demanded of you? That you love them. That you accept them. That you support and encourage them. That you cheer for them. That you be their biggest fan.
Nothing—literally nothing short of death—can stop you from doing those things. Seriously, how hard is it to believe in them? How hard is it to be encouraging? How hard is it to remind them that you don’t care what’s happened, what other people say, that you know they have goodness and potential inside them? And here’s the thing: death can’t stop you from doing those things either, because if you do them now—if you give your kids what they need cheerfully, regularly, sincerely—it will stick with them as a voice in their heads for as long as they and their own children live.