Looking Ahead

Mike and I have been watching the new A&E show Intervention. It's on Sunday nights at 10 pm. In a nutshell it's a show about people with various addictions. The participants think they're shooting a documentary about addiction, they don't know they'll be part of an intervention in a few days. This show scares us both to death, but we continue to tune in week after week.

You see a lot of drug addiction on the show, but they've also shown a couple of gambling addicts, a shopping addict and a "cutter". That one, I think, was the most disturbing. In some episodes it's easy to pinpoint what may have started these people on their paths of destruction. A couple of them were abandoned by their parents, one girl was molested. That makes it a bit easier to sit back, as the observer, and say okay I can see where this started to go downhill. For many of them though there is no "defining moment". They appear to come from warm loving families. They show pictures of happy chilhood memories. Pictures that aren't all that different from the ones in my own albums or the ones we're now making for Abby. It's those epsidoes that bring us to question each other and ourselves. How do we keep it from happening in our family? Were those kids, loved too much, not enough? Were they spoiled, have too much parental attention, not enough? What exactly is the formula? I find myself really scrutinizing the families trying to find that one little flaw. Something that I can put a finger on and say okay that's it, I know not to do that. I rarely find that one thing though and that's the scary thing. If it happened to them it could happen to me. I think before seeing the show I had the attitude that things like that wouldn't happen to us. So in that respect it's been an eye opening experience. I've also found since watching the show Mike and I spend more time talking about parenting in the long term. After seeing some of these families I know that parenting Abby now, as trying as she can be some days, is the easy part. It's only going to get harder as she gets older and it's never too early to prepare for that.