I don’t like this column. I don’t like that I feel compelled to write it. I don’t like that there’s really no way to be humorous about it, and I especially don’t like that being humorous about anything to do with the content of this column would border on inappropriate at best.

I have failed my children. In many, little ways, I have failed them. I have lost my temper. I have doled out unjust punishments. I have not been consistent. I have been dictatorial, I have looked at my phone when I should have put it away, I have parked us all in front of the television and forced them to lay down and watch it when I should have been rallying my strength and taking them outside for walks, and bike rides, and fun in general.

I have failed my children.

I will fail my children again.

But through it all I have loved them, even when I have lost, for a moment, the ability to love them well.

On Monday, Oct. 3, authorities found the bodies of 26-year-old Christopher Dilly and 25-year-old Jessica Lally dead from what they suspect is a heroin overdose. The couple, parents of a seven, five, and three-year-old, and a nine-month-old baby, “loved (her) kids,” said Lally’s sister according to a story published by CNN Wire.

And I believe that they did. Addiction takes the most insidious toll on lives, and most poignantly, on the lives of those all around the addicted. While these parents are indefensible, I get addiction. I get it.

Addiction changes the brain, and it thereby changes the person from the inside out, making them do and say things they would never think to do or say. It’s never as easy, once a person has become addicted to anything, as just “don’t do it.” Anyone who argues that such ought to be the course of action for addicts ignores the entire reality of the disease.

And yet, addition is the reason that the seven-year-old daughter of Lally and Dilly got herself dressed for school on Monday morning, Oct. 3, got herself cleaned and maybe fed, and got herself to school. That seven-year-old girl did all of the things that I as a mother spend the better portion of an hour, if not more, trying to coerce my four-year-olds to do each morning. I’ve only recently been able to do these same things for myself as an adult with any consistency for under a decade. Not much, but under.

At seven, this child told someone on her way home from school that something was wrong with her parents. That she couldn’t wake them up. At seven, this little girl was faced with a more adult reality than many of my own peers.

At seven.

It’s not fair.

I remember thinking, when I found out I was pregnant, then a week later, when I found out I was pregnant with twins, “it’s not fair.” When I had to quit school because I had to choose two of the three things I’d become – a student, an employee, and a mother – I remember thinking “it’s not fair.” When I had to sell my motorcycle, “it’s not fair.” When I spent 24 hours a day seven days a week at home with them for three years on end, “it’s not fair.”

And in many ways those things weren’t fair. I had a partner at the time. Other concessions could have been made. But fair or not, it was my life. There was no changing it.

Mine were entitled, whining indictments on fairness.

This child’s life is legitimately not fair. It’s not right. It’s not okay that a seven-year-old should have to prepare herself for her day, not because her parents were trying to teach her independence, but because they were entirely absent in all but the physical sense. It’s not fair that a seven-year-old should need to experience that moment of understanding that something has gone tragically wrong. That what she was seeing was not sleep. Was not coma. Was not a freak accident but a natural consequence of a poor choice.

I’m not calling for criticism of the parents. I’m calling for criticism of the reality we live in, were seven-year-olds, so vulnerable in such a vast and uncertain world, are tasked with notifying the authorities that the people they are meant to turn to when the very worst parts of life materialize in all their ugliness, have died.

I hate that we live in a world where a seven-year-old was tasked with such an awful, adult experience. And my heart bleeds for the seven-year-old who handled it all with such grace. The seven-year-old who just picked up and carried on with her day, because at some level, this sort of thing felt normal enough to be just a little odder than usual. A little less dysfunctional than every other day.

I have failed my children. In many little ways. But they are resilient, and creative, and independent, and brilliant, for all of those little failures on my hands. But my greatest fear – that moment I think every parent dreads just a little – that moment when they cease to be children, will never come to them this way. And it makes me physically ill that any child meets that moment this way.

Parenting is a balancing act between maintaining oneself, one’s identity, separate from one’s children or one’s role as “parent,” and at the same time surrendering themselves to the truly sacred task of gifting a healthy, happy, self-sufficient new adult to the world.

But never like this.

Never before it’s time.