A few days ago, a good friend came down with a terrible stomachache while I was staying over. The creak of hardwood floors woke me from couched slumber to find her hunched over and shuffling to the bathroom. Food poisoning we thought, or worse, the flu. Just a few hours earlier I had picked her up at the airport where she had flown in from Italy. As if jet lag wasn't bad enough, we joked. Ten hours later, when the pain hadn't ceased and the anticipated viral storm hadn't broke, we began to worry, together, if it wasn't something else.

It was. After many an hour in the emergency room, a missed diagnosis, and a second trip to the hospital, it was appendicitis (now burst). By that time, our extended circle of friends had been alerted, and her surgery, hospital stay, and recovery were now under the watch of nearly a dozen women, working in shifts, to help out. These women artfully wove their love and support together, threading their individual availabilities and lives. Single, married, children, pregnant, working, not working—each passed the baton to the next. I observed this with satisfaction, awe, and gratitude. Yes, this is what women do, but I know I am particularly lucky to have a circle of devoted women friends.

But during those earlier hours when I sat alone with her in the emergency room, her body soft with drugs, a scowl of pain fixed on her unconscious face, I couldn't help feeling, well, vulnerable. Both of us were single, and it occurred to me that many women our age—late thirties—would be here with a husband. Would I, if suffering the same emergency, have someone to take me to the hospital? To make sure the nurse was coming back with the ice chips? To get my meds from the 24-hour pharmacy while I was asleep in the car? I was so grateful to be able to do this for my friend, but that sneaky voice of fear reminded me of my aloneness.

As my age inches near 40, I can't help but see myself in relationship to many of my peers as "single without children." There are categories now, even if they are often in a state of flux. Single, married, married with children, married and trying, and divorced. I have watched many women in my life migrate from one group to another while I've stayed single. My reasons for this are varied, nuanced, and changing—as I am sure they are for others. For me, marriage and children have never been a priority. I have yet to meet the "right" guy, and I have been mostly content to follow my interests and hunches solo. I've devoted a lot of personal resources to becoming a painter, and I'm committed to living an artist's life. This is not to say all this can't be done with a husband or children, but for me it hasn't.

But in spite of my lack of urgency around marriage and motherhood, I also can't deny feeling alone. Feeling how much I need people. Remembering how much help I receive all the time (and for that matter how much I give). Ironically, my feelings of aloneness eventually lead me back to feelings of connectedness. They remind me of the "families" to which I am a member, and how I am not really alone. I can't help but wonder, however, do my married and mothering friends feel some version of this aloneness, too? If so, how is it similar or different from mine? In what shared ways do we experience vulnerability, regardless of our categories? And equally as compelling to me, how do we all benefit from needing each other? How does our need for community cut across all the "categories"?

Regardless of our marital or parental status, there is a corner in each of us that feels the unpredictability of life, the tension of it. Will everything be okay? Can I do it? Will there be someone to look after me? Will I be able to look after my loved ones? I'm pretty sure we're all asking some form of these questions, and we all crave the security that comes from family and community. The more I talk to my friends with children, or my friends with husbands, or my unmarried friends, the more I hear how much we need each other. How much we have to give.

There seems to be some kind of, I don't know, puritan ethic at work in our culture that has us suffering a false, isolating belief that we're on our own, and we have to get it right every time or we're fucked. Our government and media back it up. We've been left to create community in a fear-based, divisive culture. To relearn something that's actually our instinct. As women, I believe we have a deep intuition that this is vital if we hope to live in the safe, nurturing world we desire for our families and ourselves. But we're still figuring out how to do this. It's not like we've had tons of great models to emulate. So we're trusting our inspiration. Trusting our need for each other. That's where something like mamazine.com comes in. It's inspired by the need to hear more mamas' voices. To share more women's experiences, good, bad, and ugly. To celebrate mamas needing each other. To build a richer comamamunity.

Stephanie Dennis is a devoted mama-advocate. She kissed her corporate life goodbye to better feed her creative hunger. She holds an MFA in painting and lives, creates and works in Oakland.