A recent Huffington Post article caught my eye. It was about parenthood and the strange lines that form around the stages-and-ages that our new lives, as moms and dads, seem to be defined by. There is teething, potty training and sleep issues, and then later, there are things like school, friendships, sport teams and dating. Each day comes with its new host of problems to solve and, for a time, you are “immersed, defined, all-encompassed by them.”  And then – you’re not. Yesterday’s stage is replaced by a new one, and so on.

The author writes: “So much of parenting is like that…Every stage (every day) of raising children is its own isolated bubble…Everything feels like no one has ever really done this before.” And once one stage ends, she warns: “you can’t reinhabit the obsessions that came with it. You can remember and share tales. And smile knowingly…But you can’t go back to the place when a parenting challenge was new, and insistent and yours.”

Then there is life with a sick child.

That’s a whole different kind of bubble.

Maybe you know it. Maybe you’re trapped in the bubble called Juvenile Arthritis, like we are, and that’s why you’re here.

Or maybe the words of your child’s diagnosis – any diagnosis – just recently left your doctor’s mouth. And now, like a bubble emerging from the end of a pink, plastic wand, it has encircled you completely and fully.

How could anyone possibly understand that now every bubble is two bubbles? The stages that felt so pressing last month – potty training, sleep issues, dating – are now swallowed by the bigger, scarier and never-ceasing spheres of fear, anger and the unknown.

The author goes on to ask: “what happens when our bubbles are like armor?” Are those “thin-walls between our spheres, our stages, our experience” what really keep parents separated? Are they what fuel mommy-wars and what make us so unable to understand anyone’s parenthood journey but our own?

“Are the bubbles,” she asks, “also why parents never rise up as a movement and demand what they need — better childcare, more generous parental leave, more flexible work environments — because when we are in the moment we are too busy and exhausted, and when we are past it, the urgency is gone?”

Then I read the words that stopped me in my tracks:

“It is definitely why so much remarkable change comes from parents who become advocates — for gun control, for research into diseases that steal childhoods — because theirs are bubbles that never set them free.”

So, welcome. We are in this bubble together.

That’s why we formed Cassie and Friends; it’s the meaning we’ve found in our bubble.

And that’s why we’re fighting together for more doctors, more research, more awareness and more ways to beat Juvenile Arthritis.

Our bubble may be full of pain and fear and doctors and flare-ups, but it’s also a bubble bursting with great courage, purpose and triumph too.

Together we will achieve remarkable change.