It takes a village! Find your village! Can’t raise your children without a village! This is a common mantra in mom circles. Finding a village isn’t easy. Schedule, distance, life experience and personalities can all stand in the way of easily finding a village. But as a Catholic, I recognize that we don’t need to rely only on a village of fellow moms here on earth, we also have a village of moms in heaven. Our faith is so beautiful!
This reality was brought home to me while reading Real Moms of Real Saints by Colleen Pressprich. While a biography of a saint can often be tedious or leave us feeling inadequate, this book does quite the opposite. Short biographies of each mother accompanied by stories from Colleen’s own life in the motherhood trenches, makes for enjoyable reading (and the ability to pick up for only a minute or two and set back down as is so common in the life of a mother!). And with the subject matter focused on the mother, who sometimes are Blessed or Saint themselves, although rarely, the book is innately relatable. There are the mothers with tempers (ok, I can identify with that), the mothers that feel the guilt (here, here), the mothers that wonder if they are ever doing enough (ok, you got me). Not to mention the working mothers, the stay at home mothers, the intellectual mothers, the doubting mothers, the faithful-to-a-fault mothers, the brave mothers. All of them can be found in the book and can be found cheering you on during your journey through motherhood.
And the most beautiful thing is: these moms, all of them, raised saints. They raised saints despite their shortcomings. They raised saints because of their shortcomings. They raised saints in every century – the forward is by St. Carlo Acutis’s mother which is just STUNNING to have a mother of a canonized saint alive today to contribute to this book.
These ladies will make you feel at home. They know your struggle, know your goals, and know how hard it can be to get there. And in prayer, we can talk to them like all our other girlfriends. We have our village. We have moms to emulate who will console us and support us. We have this village with us everyday in the mothers that have walked in faith before us.