Upon learning of an impending birth, I admire the bravery of the parents.

They’ve heard the stories about how much it costs to raise a child from birth to college. They’ve heard all about the dangers of the world, the pressures upon families. We’ve seen first-hand the astonishing, unprecedented, unthinkable leaps of progress and creativity in technology that have made life today radically different than it was just 40 years ago, when the microwave oven was the latest thing.

A kid today will not only want the same old candy and treats that are so much more expensive than in my day. He will want things I don’t even know about yet, which will do things he will make them do that I will not be able to make them do.

That’s about the half of it.

A person goes into parenthood knowing he or she carries the same genes responsible for his own parents’ inabilities to parent better than they did, which, had they done, might have produced a more capable adult likely to be more competent at parenting than he will be.

If the child was to be a predictable offshoot of he and his partner, that might be provided for in advance. But who knows which relative on which side of the family, which odd mutation owing to what innocuous environmental factor, will tilt the child’s essence into a realm into which the parents might have little or no insight or access?

Often, we didn’t really know our parents; how they got to be that way; how we have become the way we are.

My two-year-old son looks at a favorite drawing of puppies and ducks and emits a laugh I’ve never heard anywhere before.

One must resort to the most obvious truths sometimes when delving into the most obscure mysteries we must somehow incorporate within the worldview we construct, the map that has both finely-detailed regions and vast “parts unknown.”

Every person has a mother and father, and every person is part of the human community, which becomes a bit more elaborate, exotic, and extensive with the addition of every single person.

Walking down the street, one sees children, adults, people of all ages. Children not with their parents, parents without their children, individuals alone, with friends, brothers, sisters, cousins, strangers. So many people could be your parents; your children; your spouse; your siblings.

As a son leaves his father and mother and becomes a father, so his son leaves him and becomes a father. Somehow, he has made it through the expenses, the genetic idiosyncracies, the dangers, the educational system, and acquired everything needed along the way.

The father and son have had their unique relationship, triumphs and struggles, not because of anything historically extraordinary, but simply in the natural courses of daily life.

A person is an individual: a son, daughter, father, mother, a soul in life among souls in life. The parent, the child: these are the relationships I understand best from the perspective that these are the temporary vehicles of the beings called “souls,” who we all are, the children of God.

Screw up though we do, and must, we are loved. We will be taken care of.