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Jill Porter | In the glaring spotlight of the media: The last taboo

THE FAMOUS AND THEIR TROUBLED CHILDREN - PAIN, SHAME, BLAME, GUILT . . .AND LOVE

IT'S TERRIBLE enough to endure the anguish of raising a troubled child.

The dashed dreams. The pain for yourself and your son or daughter.

The shame.

Ask anyone whose child has gone astray or was born not right. Ask anyone whose child is mentally ill. Drug addicted. In jail or in the hospital, in an institution or a group home.

The grief.

Terrible enough, the nights of pleading and tears, the days of worry and frustration, the frantic search for help in books, experts, programs, formulas, faith.

Terrible enough the denial, the sheer weight of sustaining hope.

The guilt.

The seething at people who think they have the answers, when you've pursued them all to no avail.

And then, if you're smart and successful and prominent enough, one day it becomes everybody's business.

One day, it becomes gossip and scandal and chatter for the water cooler and talk radio.

Your private anguish becomes a public spectacle.

You're Common Pleas Judge Lisa Richette, a brilliant and once-beautiful icon, a role model who ascended to the bench when women judges were rare.

And, now we know, the mother of a son who's apparently not quite right. Now we know about the jobs he's lost, his brushes with police, his strange antics throughout the years.

Because he allegedly attacked and injured Judge Richette and exposed himself to a TV reporter and got his mother on the front page of this newspaper.

And we snicker and chatter about it, marvel at the details.

But I cringe instead. Feel sorrow for him. Weep for her.

Or you're Eagles coach Andy Reid, an exemplary human being on and off the football field by everyone's account.

And then your two sons are criminal defendants, facing serious charges related to the two worst plagues of our time: guns and drugs.

And when your pain is as searing as it could be, it goes impossibly deeper: Britt Reid was taken into custody again yesterday after, police said, he failed a sobriety test in a shopping center parking lot.

Or you're former Police Commissioner John Timoney or former Vice President Albert Gore, both of whose sons have been arrested for drugs. Or you're Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson and it's your grandson who's gone astray.

There are countless others.

And people blame you.

They judge you and speculate on what you did wrong.

You work too hard. You weren't there for them. You failed.

What did you do wrong? As if the question hasn't haunted you every day of your life, every moment of every sleepless night.

What did you do wrong? Because the equation is incontrovertible: good parents have good children.

Good parents raise functioning, productive, successful, likable, law-abiding, normal children.

What did you do wrong?

And you can't talk about it, can't defend yourself or your child, can't violate family boundaries by making it any more public than it already is.

It hurts too much.

You can't explain anyway, especially to yourself.

It's the last taboo, really.

Not money any more. Not sex. Not even death.

But troubled children.

Children who live on the margins, or can't quite make it on their own, or do crazy or criminal things.

Children who don't supply boastful stories to tell, don't inspire the showing of photographs, don't invite the parental entitlement of pride.

Love, yes. Love, of course. Love despite everything, love that keeps you searching for the answers that never seem to come.

Love that makes you pray for the moment that the scrutiny goes away and you can be alone again with your heartache and the knowledge that you'll never give up trying to help, that you'll never give up the sustaining elixir - some would say delusion - of hope. *

E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/porter