Not mine

How many parents get into a lot of suffering because they think the child who’s been born from the womb is my child, my son, my daughter. I was trying to mention last week that you just give that person a body, look after them, train them, give them an education, feed them. Where that person came from, the important part of them—their mind, their stream-of-consciousness, whatever you wish to call it, their character—carried with all its karma from their past life—who knows where all that came from? And a woman becomes pregnant and has got this body in there that is waiting for something to come in, who knows what will come in? There have been wonderful parents who have had monsters for children. There have been monstrous parents who've had saints for children. And of course you are probably somewhere in between, although sometimes you may think “maybe on the monster side” with your children. But why is that? Every sort of child psychologist would know that it can never be explained by the genetics or by the situation of the parents or the economics or whatever else. There are so many other factors that it can only be something that comes into the child from birth, from outside the birth. That’s why, as a good mother, you should look at your child as someone who’s a friend for a few years. Someone who has come into your life but doesn't belong to you.

Nature will teach that to you when your child leaves home, when they go their own way. You realize they are not an extension of you. They’re not part of your body like your arm or your leg which you can tell what to do. But they will go their own way. The sooner one realizes that—they aren’t mine, they’re just my responsibility for a while—the whole attitude becomes different. Instead of becoming a control, domineering attitude, it becomes a sense of responsibility, a sense of care and love, but a respect for that being as being independent of us. In other words, we can learn how to let go. Even if that child does something we don’t like, even really does something, even the worst thing that child can do, die. Even then, if we realize that that is not ours. The child has come in according to its own karma, its own nature. It’s now gone. We don’t need to grieve and to be upset. It wasn't ours in the first place. It came in unbidden. It went without saying farewell. That is the nature of life and death.

So the idea of non-Self in this sense is realizing we don’t control. There’s not a person who owns another person. But deeper than that, to be able to let go our loved ones, being able to let go of our possessions. They are not ours. 

--Ajahn Brahm, "Anatta, Non-Self"