Whether it was about marriage or parenting or location, for many of us, it doesn’t make sense to stick to the picture of family we came up with earlier in our lives. It might be that our desires change or that our circumstances just don’t line up with an old vision. Either way, many people told me that discarding the picture they had of how their lives would be—sometimes joyfully, sometimes through grieving—was necessary in order to fully embrace something better, or at least accept something different.
