You did the best you could.

If you're on Facebook, you may have seen a story come up from a young mother that lost her four year-old boy recently in a terrible car accident. I saw this a few days ago, and it was the absolute most soul-shattering, heart-shredding thing I've read in a long, long time. If you haven't seen it already, you can read her story here.

The media blows up any and every opportunity to get a rise out of us, and through the development of the internet and social media, a new breed has been born among us, the likes of which I would love to never, ever see again: the mom-shamer.

Mom-shamers adopt the most nauseating of holier-than-thou attitudes regarding others' parenting struggles, mistakes, mishaps or simple accidents. This is easy to do from behind a keyboard, where you remain mostly anonymous and have the power to block anyone that would disagree with or speak against you. It's convenient, isn't it? Why do we get such a sick thrill out of shoving our views down other peoples' throats just because we can control the backlash, to a certain degree?

Ashley, the woman that wrote the story I linked above, was a good mama doing the best she could do. She tries her best to protect her many children (have you ever tried to care for a child? How about more than one?). She loves them and cherishes them and wants nothing but their health, safety and happiness. Why then, was she robbed of the life of one of her children? A tragic, unfortunate accident, but an accident. A split-second decision she made to try and keep her babies safe, which turned sour and backfired on her.

And the internet tore her to shreds for it.

It makes me ill... why do we have to do this? Why can't we just support each other? Why does this shaming culture exist at all? Is it so people that hate themselves and their lives can let their anger out by misdirecting it at someone who doesn't deserve it? The same thing happened with the two year-old boy that was taken by the alligator, and the little boy that fell into the gorilla enclosure in Cincinnati. People. Had. A FIELD DAY.

What would you do in those situations? How would you feel? How would you handle knowing that no matter how much you might love and try to protect your babies, things happen that you can't control, mistakes are made, accidents happen, and human error steps to the forefront because we're all just simply human. You can't say it wouldn't be you, or it wouldn't be your child. You literally cannot say that and make it true, because you will never know what's going to happen to you, or how, or why.

My point is, can we please, please stop shaming each other as parental failures? We all suck at this, darlings. We all make mistakes. Raising a child is literally just a gamble as to how little you manage to screw up. You are not a perfect parent, and nobody should ever expect you to be. Can we stop hiding behind our Facebook pages like cowards and ripping other people apart? We're human parents, and therefore, we are REQUIRED to make mistakes. Kids don't come with a manual.

Please do not misunderstand: I'm not saying there aren't horrible parents out there. The ones that neglect, abuse, or otherwise hurt their babies. I, for one, think those people should be sterilized and quarantined (and yes, I realize Hitler did this to innocent people... the point though, is that it takes a special kind of monster to hurt a child, much less your own). But for those of us that do the best we can, I think we deserve to cut ourselves and each other a little slack.

That's all we can do. That's all we can EVER do.

So Mama... Daddy... whoever you are to that child... if you can say at the end of the day that you did the best you could, then you're doing a damn fine job.

Even when it looks like this.