I used to feel that way. I won't any longer. Not to say that in some part of my heart and soul... but there are the next ones,
TMI. My daughter went career. When she was a kid she always said she wanted at least six kids. In the last 10 years, she has had 4 misses. Now she is HERE at 31 weeks in, and well. Both of them. 31. SHE has a name. Clover (my wife's gm) Joy (my daughter's choice) which, weirdly enough, is my son's ex's GM. That Joy...that Joy...when her daughter and granddaughter ran away...from my son and a 22-month-old boy and a 9-month-old girl to do dope, she was here for these gk's. She passed from leukemia two years gone.
I speak her name out loud.
CLOVER JOY
God Bless her.
You do what you can with who you can. There are those who will have to find their own path, and I won't enable the wrong road.
Yes, for a time, you write them off and focus on the little ones. It isn't that you don't care, deep down, but you can't afford the pain when there are others who need you.
But when they return to the fold, when they quit being self-destructive and get back on a good path, what rejoicing in my heart!
A grandson, shoved out of a pickup by a couple of hookers in a convenience store parking lot, dead when he hit the ground (OD), spotted by a convenience store clerk who locked the till, ran out and gave him CPR until the police arrived and hit him with Narcan yet lives, a couple years later, clean, working, looking good, with his back straight again and that sparkle back in his eye he had before he got into drugs. All things are possible, and it took a lot of prayer, miracles, and the Grace of The Almighty, but for a while we expected the next we heard of him would be a death notice.
You just can't live every day like that, waiting for the hammer to fall, and there were others to consider.
We just gave him over to the Lord, and did what we could for the rest.