Usually I want to bring a little more emphasis on the role we play in adult matters, and national or international affairs. Today I saw something I think needs attention on an inter-personal level.

Maybe mommying isn't for just anyone. I don't think anyone has ever found it easy, but then later you have an adult to talk to without any sort of barriers to get over, if you're lucky.

Sometimes it seems to bring out the worst in us though. And when parents gang up in their kids' rivalries some bizarre and horrible things tend to happen.

When I read this story about a 13-year-old's family creating a way to use MySpace to make their child's dream revenge come true, my stomach turned. Imagine putting together a plot and involving your own child, essentially teaching meanness and using your adult (or aged) experience to make it really really mean. Double lesson given, in how to make your ex miserable and in still having that kind of urge as an 'adult'.

Reminds me of a family that helped their kids shoplift in my little store in Chincoteague. Switched some model horses from a box with a high price tag on it into a box with a low price tag on it, paid and left. When we found the low price models in the high price box very shortly after, we realized what had occurred. Repulsive enough. But adult managed revenge on your child's friends?

On Eschaton this a.m. I had a little conversation with "mogwai, cloud 9 dweller" about being a real commie pinko before I turned 25, and was told it's a different world for kids. Then I came across this and I agree, this could not have happened in the 60's.

In Dardenne, MO, then, a family created a boyfriend online for a child, gave reign to fantasies she'd never been able to actually enjoy before, then suddenly, without cause, brutally hacked off that line to the life they'd invented. The girl, who'd been suicidal before, killed herself.

Sorry, don't you think there should be a license required for parenting?

Part of the reason for Megan's rosy outlook was Josh, Tina says. After school, Megan would rush to the computer.

"Megan had a lifelong struggle with weight and self-esteem," Tina says. "And now she finally had a boy who she thought really thought she was pretty."

It did seem odd, Tina says, that Josh never asked for Megan's phone number. And when Megan asked for his, she says, Josh said he didn't have a cell and his mother did not yet have a landline.

And then on Sunday, Oct. 15, 2006, Megan received a puzzling and disturbing message from Josh. Tina recalls that it said: "I don't know if I want to be friends with you anymore because I've heard that you are not very nice to your friends."

Frantic, Megan shot back: "What are you talking about?"

SHADOWY CYBERSPACE

This sort of pretense is something we all do to some extent online, laughy-facing when we're not really into some one else's kind of humor, as you would if you were face to face most likely. But to do this as an adult to a child?

It's no joke, I spit on this parent(s).