Don't judge me.

Here's a news flash for everyone. I know it might come as a shock to some people.

I'm not perfect.

I have made so many mistakes in my life - we all have, haven't we?

Mistakes are a part of life, and there are so many ways that we can handle them.

We can learn from them, and not make the same mistake again.
We can use what we learned to make sure that our loved ones don't do the same thing.
We can make them a few times just to make sure that they were really mistakes before we learn from them.
We can even pretend that we didn't make the mistakes and act like everything is ok, when in all actuality, it isn't.

Or, my all-time favorite thing to do with a mistake (made by someone else, of course) is to judge a person for her mistakes. (I hope you sense the sarcasm on that...)

Think about it...

We aren't perfect. We've all made mistakes. Right?

So we see someone else make a mistake. It happens, right?

But instead of supporting that person while she regains her footing on the ground that has slipped out from under her, we judge that person. We ridicule that person. We call her a bad person, or worse yet, a bad mother. Instead of keeping our opinions to ourselves, we voice them, and we hurt her. We cause her to doubt herself. We don't go back to her and ask her for her side of the story so that we may better understand her actions - instead, we cut her out of our life.

We pretend that she doesn't exist anymore.

We exclude her from everything.

Why? Because she wasn't perfect, and may not have handled a situation the way that we would have wanted her to do it. But...maybe, just maybe, she had her reasons for handling it that way. Maybe it went way deeper than what we saw on the surface. But we will never know the reasons unless we ask.

At the same time, after we've cut her out of our lives, maybe she's learned from her mistakes. Maybe she's become a better person. Maybe she's even become stronger than she ever was, stronger than we ever gave her credit for being.

Maybe someday, we will find out her reasoning for doing what she did - if we choose to ask her about it. And maybe, she won't be as judgmental of us as we were of her.