Responding to the hard questions with a way to help

As hard as it is sometimes to take care of a baby around the clock, I know times are coming when parenting will require more than that. I know Flybaby will have problems or decisions I won’t be able to help him with, and he will ask hard questions I don’t have answers for. And other times, he may have questions I do have answers for, but I will squirm as I respond to him.

My mother, Cammy, may have squirmed one time when as a kid, I asked her about the “holes” in her face dotting her cheeks like a sponge.

Cammy never did and still doesn’t talk much about her childhood. Her father died when she was a girl, and her stepfather was abusive. She answered me that one time, she said something smart to her stepfather, so he grabbed a pot of hot water off the stove and threw it at her. She was burned. She had several skin treatments of some kind, but she stopped going before her skin could be restored because the treatments were so painful. So Cammy was left with a pocked appearance.

In that time and place, social services didn’t really exist. If “spare the rod and spoil the child” meant excessive punishment, then people reasoned the child probably deserved it and would be better off having been “corrected.” People didn’t question authority, and parents were authorities. So my mother lived with the abuse.

It’s so hard for me to hear in the news about a child who has been abused -- even more so now that I’m a mother. Child abuse is still a huge problem today, but there are more places that offer help to abused children. One of them in my area is Kids In Distress, a private, nonprofit agency. It offers abused, neglected and abandoned children a place to stay and a therapeutic preschool. Kids in Distress also offers programs for families to prevent abuse -- that is huge!

When the Parent Bloggers Network wanted to help spread the word about iBakeSale, a new way to raise funds for your favorite charity, I knew I wanted to donate to Kids In Distress. As a nonprofit, Kids In Distress relies on community help. Signing up at iBakeSale is such an easy way to give to the kids who are hurting in my town. I signed up for a fast, free account, selected Kids In Distress as my cause, and got shopping!

Yes, shopping! Whoever first thought of cash-back shopping as a way to donate money to a worthy cause gets a gold star. The way it works is online retailers (big ones, too, like Macy’s, Disney, Wal-Mart and Hallmark) offer a percentage of your spending total to your chosen cause. All you have to do is shop! If you’re going to buy online anyway, it might as well help someone out. If you’d like to join me in donating to Kids In Distress, please click here and join my group:



Once you’ve signed up for your account (it takes less than five minutes), you can choose other groups to donate to -- like your children’s school or even yourself, if you want that spending to come back to you. With so many retailers on board offering money back, it doesn’t even make sense to shop at those online stores without someone getting a kickback. I’m happy to make sure Kids In Distress gets some benefit from this easy way to raise funds.

When Flybaby gets to the stage when he asks me the hard questions and he asks me why some people are so cruel, I won’t have an answer for him. However, I plan to tell him we can help alleviate suffering and help make others’ lives better.