Little Did I Know by Vanessa Rush Southern

An inclusive and diverse anthology of reflections on the spiritual gifts and challenges of raising young people and the ways that those who nurture and teach children are nurtured and taught themselves.

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 and the ways that those who nurture and teach children are nurtured and taught themselves. 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, bursting like fireworks in the midst of casual conversations and rainy days. She found that the young lives that intersect or get invited into relationship with our own shape and change us and those we love 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 place 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.