What to Expect When You're Letting Go

Someone forgot to write this book - the sequel to the best-selling What to Expect When You're Expecting. In this now classic guide, expectant mothers and fathers learn what to anticipate as they await the arrival of their own new tiny human. The chapters are filled with information and insight to fill in the terrifying unknowns with important knowledge, attempting to prepare us for one of the most life-changing experiences any of us will ever encounter.

Once you're little human arrives and you hold her/him in your arms though, many of us would argue there really is not any way to expect to be prepared for it, and here's why: the experience of growing and nuturing another human within your body is a wonder and mystery that science itself can't fully comprehend and explain. This newly created person is separate and other - an individual set apart yet so utterly dependent from that moment of conception. In this instant, a profound bond forms, setting us on an unwitting course of letting go we didn't expect to be an integral part of the whole experience.

What to expect when you're expecting? You can expect to give everything you've got to the nurture and formation for this inherently other individual who will teach you a lot about how independent and other he/she truly is. This human will take all the love you build into him/her - through sleepless nights, homework help, frustrated tears, loss and failure, success and victories and trying to understand the whys and what fors - and simply leave one day.

This is how it works.This is what you can expect - in the not-too-distant future you will be letting go - you will be watching that tiny hand with chubby fingers wrapped around yours grow big and strong and let go. You can expect it to hurt, sometimes even take your breath away. You can expect a suffocating desire to try to keep it from happening. But you can expect there's nothing you can do to stop this trajectory. You can expect to give grace when harsh words and eye ball rolling comes your way. You can expect your patience to run low but maintaining its reserves create a soft landing for the tensions and conflicts that threaten to tear you apart. You can expect to wait up late and listen long in those unexpected talkative moments. You can expect to wonder at how someone so different than you actually came from you. You can expect callused knees to grow tired from praying. You can expect your heart to swell with inexplicable joy, even as you watch them pack up their own car and drive away. And, this is the sequel that someone should write to help us after teaching us what to expect when we're expecting.

Perhaps, if we knew a little more about what to expect when we're letting go, we would frame how we parent differently. With the time we've been given, we can purpose our parenting around the drawing out and building up fo the unique, one-of-a-kind design of our little people who were always meant to grow beyond our bonds, to become the individuals they were meant to be from that very first moment they were conceived, not only inside a mother's womb but in the mind of God.