It is my conviction that parents need to be the best that they can be but that
it is not their *fault* if their kids make mistakes, and when a kid does well,
it is the kid that did well, not those who birthed it.

Likewise, LC's need to do the best that they can.  But we cannot overcome the
rest of society, we can not errase experiences that women had as young children,
we cannot give them new support systems.  When we have successes, they are not
really our successes but belong to the mom and baby.  Our failures also are
very rarely anything that we could have changed.  I certainly think that we
need to pretend that we did the successes because we need that positive feed
back.  But if we take ownership of the successes, are we also going to make
ourselves take ownership of the failures?  If there is something that we can
learn from the failure that will help future clients, than we need to work
through the interaction.  But the vast majority of the time, all we do is kick
ourselves when we are down.

We are good people, we do important work.  And as we learn more from each other
we will continue getting better.

Thanks Lactnet for giving us a place to vent and to grow.

Ruth of Verona