When bad things happen to good parents

I would never, ever do that, I remember thinking. How could any good parent do that?

But four children and a whole lotta parenting later, I understand quite clearly how a good parent “could do that.” After making my own mistakes over and over and over, and seeing many other friends and family members stumble their way through raising human beings into adulthood, I generally think something very different when I hear about a parent losing a beloved child to something that in a perfect world, should have been prevented. Now, instead of, “how could he/she do that?” I think, “There but by the grace of God, go I.”

Read the rest over at my Babble blog.