(Insert your favorite variation on "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt" here.)

This one isn't funny, just kind of tragic for everyone involved. I knew a mother who had to walk with a walking stick, a hefty one. She had MS and so her health was a really big concern. She felt guilty because her illness must be a cause of stress to her six-year-old son, so she never disciplined him.

He was an absolute terror. None of the kids in our circle wanted to play with him because he would either bully them or use language so foul that even the really innocent ones knew something was wrong.

The really sad thing was that the mom saw her kid being left out and decided that his life was tragic -- he had an ill, disabled mother and he was shunned by the kids who ought to have been his friends. So then she'd be even "nicer" to him -- let him do whatever he wanted no matter how scary or inappropriate.

Not being an idiot, he soon learned that he could pretty much do anything he wanted. He didn't even bother hiding his behavior from her, because he didn't have to. When he got angry about something -- one time when she wouldn't buy him a third treat from the ice cream man, another when they had to go home from the park and he wanted to stay and play -- he would pick up her walking stick and swing it at her. This, of course, made the other kids that much more determined not to play with him. If he'd act that way with his mother, someone who loved him and whom (presumably) he loved, what would he do to them?

This mother was apparently so terrified at the idea of her son's really being in the wrong that she would do anything to avoid having to confront it. Once she followed a little girl around after the girl had said that this boy had called her some really bad names. Several other kids had heard him, and when he denied doing so, he used even worse language than he'd been accused of, so it looked pretty bad. So the mother kept following this girl around and just haranguing her with questions. She insisted that the little girl must have done something first to provoke her son into saying what he said. She literally wouldn't leave this kid alone. The girl just wanted to be able to play in peace, so after about fifteen minutes, she "confessed" -- yes, okay, maybe she said something that upset him. The mom came away feeling vindicated. See? There was nothing wrong with her son. He had only acted in self-defense.

More than once, when other mothers would try to talk to her about any of this, she would say, "No one's ever said anything about his behavior to me." Well, first of all, she was saying it to someone who was saying something about it; and since she had occasion to say that more than once, it obviously wasn't true. Second, there was good reason that people hadn't spoken to her much before. If it was something he was doing to her (or right in front of her -- he would swear like a sailor and she wouldn't turn a hair), what were we supposed to say? "Okay, just so you know, he just said three bad words and almost gave you a concussion with your own walking stick." And when it was something that he did to another kid, as soon as the kid would run up crying about what had happened, this mother would usually grab her kid's hand and just split -- leave as fast as she could.