As we said recently, the wonderful thing about parenting is that it opens you up. It expands your heart to a new capacity, a level you didn’t think possible. The problem, of course, is just how exposed this makes you feel.

Jennifer Lawrence, who we quote in that last email, was aghast at the cost of loving our spouses and our kids in this all-consuming way. “They’re both just, like, out there,” she said of her son and husband, “walking around, crossing streets. He’s gonna drive one day. He’s gonna be a stupid teenager and be behind the wheel of a car. And I’m just gonna be like, Good night! You know? Like, who sleeps?”

It’s insane, isn’t it? Our heart is attuned to a whole new, higher level of feeling…and the people we care about the most are the most reckless, vulnerable, insensitive, delusional people on Earth! It’s almost a torture designed by the gods. You finally learn how to love…and then it turns into something you feel like you could lose at any moment! You love something that, from the second they are born, seems to want to hurt itself–physically at first, emotionally later…and in between they like to jump off stuff and get irrationally attached to objects.

So if you wonder why you’re anxious, stressed, exhausted sometimes, this is why. You’re being tested, tempted, tweaked by fate. Life is no more dangerous or unpredictable than before…you just have a capacity to feel it, a sensitivity to it that is new…that will never go away.