We are iced in here today, and Dora is home from school. Of course, Beth is already "at school" (here at home!), so the weather doesn’t impact us one bit. After Beth completes some schoolwork and Dora does homework and chores, we’re going to bake some Christmas cookies.

I recently received an email from yet another struggling family that includes a very young child who is having significant difficulties. This family is so burned out and their external resources are slim and none. Even the support they have been getting from extended family is waning as everyone grows weary of “one step forward, three steps backwards.” This family is now adding the threat of social services involvement to the already overflowing plate of worry, stress and resentment. This mom asked me if I knew of other families where an extended family member had been the one to phone social services and report abuse. Boy, do I. No doubt my friend Kelly will chime in here … thanks to her “ex-mom” as Kelly calls her, Kelly and her husband lost the placement of two foster kids.

I have stories out the wazoo about how my folks didn’t understand the “big picture” when it came to my kids. Only after years and years and years of watching Amy flounder did my parents buy into our reality at all. My dad still fights the knowledge. Rather than admit that Amy makes the choices she makes, he’d rather just not think about it at all. He can’t fathom that someone would choose to waste their life. As a depression era child, he simply doesn’t understand why Amy doesn’t embrace all that was offered.

It has been my experience that it is nearly impossible to explain life with an attachment-affected child to someone not living that life as well. That is precisely why it is so critical that parents like us find other parents like us! We must know that we are not alone. But how do we educate extended family members, neighbors, clergy, and grocery store clerks?

We need the support of extended family more than ever when our immediate family is imploding … but more often than not, we find more condemnation, more emotional trauma, more grief.

Last night I watched a taped episode of The Closer. Kyra Sedgwick plays police chief Brenda Leigh, and Frances Sternhagen plays her elderly southern mother. In this particular episode, Brenda lies to a young robber about his brother being murdered, in order to extract information from the man about his accomplices. Brenda’s parents are caught in the web of deceit as well, and when her mother realizes this fact, she is very angry with Brenda. The mother has no frame of reference for the big picture. Brenda whips out photos of two slain armored car drivers and asks her mother, “What about these families? Do you care about them at all?”

So it is with us. We see the bigger picture. We are the families of the slain armored car drivers, but everyone around us only sees the distraught young man who was manipulated into thinking his younger brother was murdered. Never mind the fact that the robber’s choices are what endangered the life of his brother in the first place. This episode portrayed the young robber as a “good guy who made bad choices.” He’s depicted as quite human, for lack of a better way to describe it. So are our kids--they are human, too. But does that absolve our children from having to experience the consequences of their choices? And does that protect us as well, as we live with the fallout of their poor choices?

Brenda tells her mother, “I don’t like what I had to do, but if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t change a thing.” We do the best we can with the cards we're dealt ...

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