After writing yesterday’s post about tough-loving my youngest, I went over to Suburban Correspondent and promptly burst into tears. She writes of our desire as parents to believe we’re doing everything right, and our desire to believe that those children that go wrong, go wrong because other people’s parents didn’t do enough. She says:

“You see, we need to reassure ourselves that we are in control, that we will not become the next poster family for Kids-Gone-Wrong. We need to protect our illusions of invincibility, even when doing so translates into a lack of compassion for our fellow parents, a refusal to acknowledge our common frailty in the face of the vicissitudes of this earthly life.”

Her post refers to another blogger that I sometimes follow, MamaPundit, who just lost a teenager to drug addiction. Both are worth reading fully, since their stories could be any of our stories.

I have to admit that long, long ago when I first started working with teenagers at church, I would sometimes see a messed-up, mentally mangled child and think, “What the HECK did those parents do?” Over the years, as my own children have grown to adulthood, I have been completely humbled by that opinion. So very often, we put everything we can into our children, and they are mangled and messed up by their own choices, or by the company they keep.

I was recently talking to the mother of a fairly-perfect teen about the type of invisible competition among mothers that has us comparing our children as evidence of our superior mothering. I asked her, “How would you feel if you had to admit to your friends that your teen dropped out of sports and high school and decided against going to college?” She thought she was free from that sort of competitiveness, but didn’t have a good answer for the question.

Suburban Correspondent ends it beautifully by saying:

“…perhaps, in honor of her suffering, each and every one of us can try to be a little kinder to whomever we meet today – because we just don’t know who else among us may have been similarly sucker-punched by the loss of that illusion of control.”