Inspired by the pandemic and her own teenage daughter’s upcoming departure from home, editor Vanessa Rush Southern set out to collect an anthology of reflections on the spiritual gifts and challenges of raising young people. In reflecting with others, she found an array of life experiences, choices, struggles, and insights. She found joy and deep meaning pressed up against all the hard parts, tumbling out between diapers and carpool runs, breaking in like fireworks in the midst of casual conversations, in an email from a birth mother that turns the world on its end. She found that the young lives that intersect or get invited into relationship with our own, however we make or made our way to each other, have the power to change us, all of us, in ways both startling and universal.

This inclusive and diverse anthology includes all kinds of families: chosen and biological, extended families, single parents, divorced parents, and more—a beautiful spectrum of people reflecting on the role children and young people have played in their lives and in their larger search for meaning. Little Did I Know goes well beyond the sentimental to an honest reckoning with the vulnerability and beauty of parenting and caregiving.

Vanessa Rush Southern is the senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco and has served congregations in Boston; Washington, D.C.; and Summit, New Jersey. She is the author of two books, This Piece of Eden and Miles of Dream, and has been published in the Dallas Morning News, Scroll India, and Woman’s Day Magazine. She is married to Rohit Menezes and mother to Leila Menezes.

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