Is anyone else feeling just a little bit used right now?

First, you will recall the story of Anita Tedaldi, the mother who disrupted the adoption of her eighteen-month-old son after making the wrenching decision that she could not meet his needs. I wrote nearly three weeks ago about my reluctance to pass judgment in her case. I posited that while Tedaldi certainly had made a mistake in going through with the adoption in the first place as she had clearly not adequately prepared herself for what this child would need, it was possible that she had, in the face of her mistake, done what was best for the little boy in question by turning him over to another family who could raise him and who would welcome the challenges he brings to their home. It was possible that Tedaldi had made an agonizing decision at least in part out of love.

I stand by what I wrote then about the possible reasons for a decision like Tedaldi’s, which is, fortunately, relatively rare in the adoptive world. Adopting a child should be no different from having a biological challenge in its permanence, but as with anything in this world, very occasionally, circumstances may create an exception.

However, something I learned recently has, rightly or wrongly, sapped my sympathy for Tedaldi’s individual case. Tedaldi, who wrote an essay and appeared on the Today Show to explain her heartbreaking, personal decision, apparently has a book scheduled to be released in February 2010. The topic? Parenting.

(Wait. Stop the presses. Before you say anything, let me clarify: yes, I write about parenting. Yes, sometimes my writing includes advice, despite the fact that I make my own mistakes as a parent. And yes, I hope that someday you will read my books—once they are written. But by launching my words into the public arena, I know that I open myself up to criticism based on those words–though I’d prefer it if you were nice and fair-minded about it.)

Yup, it seems Anita Tedaldi’s parenting manual, Major Moms – Keeping Your Troops in Line, will be released by Adams Media in a few short months, meaning that she wrote it and had the book deal in place before she went on this publicity blitz. Funny how we never heard about that while she was talking about her disrupted adoption. I suppose I should have researched Tedaldi more thoroughly before I blogged about her story, but I try to view the world with slightly less cynicism than that. In my view, Tedaldi’s failure to disclose her forthcoming book undermines her presentation of the story of her failed adoption, and as for the book itself—well, let’s just say that I plan to find other sources from which to gather my parenting advice.

As if the Tedaldi story weren’t enough, now we have the Balloon Boy (a.k.a. Falcon Heene) fiasco. Maybe I’m naïve, but when conflicting theories emerged about Balloon Boy’s five hours hidden in the attic of his house while public rescue attempts to the tune of thousands of dollars were launched to recover him if he was, as was feared, accidentally caught in his family’s soaring, handmade helium balloon, I was on the fence. Either story could be true, I reasoned. The six-year-old might just have been hiding because he feared getting in trouble; my own son did something similar two years ago. Or, his unusual, reality-television-appearing, storm-chasing family might have contrived a publicity stunt. I wasn’t willing to judge people I didn’t know without more facts.

Well, the facts are in, and my cynicism runs free again. The sheriff with jurisdiction in the case called the Balloon Boy incident a hoax, one perpetrated by parents who cared less about their children’s welfare (poor Falcon puked twice on national television shows when asked about why he hid when everyone was looking for him) and wasting the public’s dollars and sympathy than they did about making sure everyone knew who they were. Now the Heenes may be facing felony charges, and even though I’m glad I didn’t watch the live television coverage as cameras followed the search for Falcon (are they sure that was a helium balloon and not a white Ford Bronco they were following?), I stand with the law enforcement community that plans to hold one or both Heene parents accountable for what they did.

These stories and others like them reach out to those of us who are parents and ask us to empathize. The actors in these scenarios appeal to us precisely because as parents, we know what it is to feel that overwhelming maternal or paternal love and can imagine the squeezing of the heart, the absence of breath that must surely come when something unthinkable happens to one of our children. But like the boy who cried wolf, stories that resolve with cynicism and dishonesty in the end will eventually erode our sympathy until we not only refuse to believe genuine tragedies and triumphs when we see them, but we will approach our entire community of fellow human beings with callousness as well.

The twenty-first century has begun with public sharing of a nature and breadth we’ve never seen before. Let these stories be a lesson to all of us to regard what we see, hear and read with an appropriate level of skepticism, so that the people who receive our sympathies are the ones who truly deserve them.