But most of us persist in doing what we can for our kids, even when life has dealt us a bum hand. I thought of the South-Central Los Angeles father who enlisted the help of youth workers, neighbors and friends so that his youngest child, a boy, wouldn't end up in jail as did his previous son. And I thought of the two women sitting beside me. As their child accepted her diploma, two hands clasped each other. The wrinkled hand belonged to the grandmother who had raised this girl, the taut, tapered other fingers to the mother who had decided to return after 12 years and to start building a relationship with a daughter she no longer knew.
All families experience such moments of redemption and grace.
I suggest that we hold those memories in front of us each day as we go about the tender, tedious and tumultuous business of being a parent. We're never out of the woods with our kids. But we stand a heck of a better chance of finding our way through the forest if we look up at the sky rather than down at our feet. Our children, naturally optimistic, will teach us how to do that, if we pay attention. Last fall, I was driving my teenage son to a music lesson in an urban neighborhood with which I was unfamiliar.