May God have mercy on us, whatever god might be looking down to see and hear this news. We are not ready - haven’t been and won’t be - and although she is celebrating, smiling, I feel I might collapse to my knees and bleed forward into the concrete flooding into another world. What a great escape that would be, with all the changes that will be coming. For us, and for them. This being that we do not yet know, but who we will spend at least the next 18 years with in the same home. What if we can’t raise them right? What if they despise us? What if, after all we do, they abandon us, and I am left like some decrepit empty nester, a bird without a home?

May I look back on these feelings one day and be wrong. Mercy, please.