International Liberation Reference Person for Parents
I am the International Liberation Reference Person for Parents. Parents are precious. You parents are precious to me, and you come first. We have this awesome job of being close to young people as they grow. We get to connect deeply with them. We get to love them with all our hearts, and we get to be loved by them. It is really smart of us to be parents.
We are also oppressed. We don’t get paid for the job we do, and we work our butts off.1 This is an incredibly demanding job that takes intelligence, stamina, time, and all kinds of organization. We have to spend a lot of our time figuring out how to provide our families with their very basic needs when we would rather be giving attention to our children. So we are oppressed. This is one of the most valuable jobs in the whole world, and we don’t get to do it the way we want to. Then we get blamed because our children have difficulties. This is outrageous! And, as you know, society is falling apart—it’s becoming harsher for parents and families, and there is less resource.
So this is what we get to do:
1) We get to use the tools of Co-Counseling to fight for ourselves and our re-emergence, so we can think well about our own lives and about our children, and support them the way we want to.
2) We get to appreciate ourselves and each other as parents.
3) We get to build support for ourselves, inside and outside of Co-Counseling, so that we cut through the isolation. We get to talk about what’s going on2 in our families. We get to discharge on the difficulties we are up against. We get to stand up for3 policies that support families and young people, that respect young people and parents and allow them to discharge.
4) We get to unite with other workers who take care of people. In society the people who do the most important jobs get paid the least, or nothing at all. That’s partly because these jobs are usually associated with women. We get to stand up and get together with all the people who care for people and figure out policies that are right for us.
Somerville, Massachusetts, USA
1 “Work our butts off” means work extremely hard.
2 “Going on” means happening.
3 "Stand up for" means support, fight for.