Children need to feel secure

There is no greater gift we parents can give to our children than a home that guarantees security and unconditional love. Because everything else — faith, confidence, trust, morality, curiosity — builds from there.

Which makes me wonder. Because over the past two years or so, I feel surrounded with news, both here in my real life and among those tarred in headlines, of husbands and wives who cannot resist the temptation of an attractive offer before them.

As a child of divorce, married to a child of divorce, these stories take on a personal meaning to me, even all these years into adulthood.

I've never met Mark or Jenny Sanford, and I know nothing about the sturdiness of their marriage or the depth of their love for one another.

But I do know many wives (and husbands) who have spent the past two weeks imagining what it would be like to wake up one day and discover the person you trusted has transformed into someone willing to lie and cheat.

We've imagined a spouse calling someone else a soulmate.

We've imagined reading the e-mails.

I can't go there for long. Because then I imagine the kids involved. I imagine them finding out these things.

It's one thing to commit such a selfish act against the man or woman to whom you made an ultimate promise before God, family and friends.

It's another to yank away your children's rug of security to fulfill your own desires.

Because no other people in this world are more influential in setting children's moral compasses than their parents, or whichever adults are providing them daily love, care and shelter.

The security of home crumbles when a parent walks out the door and doesn't think back to the people living there.

So I wonder how the Sanfords' sons, how the countless other children facing such sad disappointments in their young lives, are faring.

Because the hardest part of watching a parent make really bad decisions is the seismic shattering of your foundation, of that belief that your parents above all others will stick by you, will protect you from the lies of the world. Not bring them in the front door.

I wonder if Mark Sanford thought of his sons playing at home when he bought that plane ticket to Argentina over Father's Day weekend. Knowing that surely one day they and everyone they know would find out because, thanks to his career, they live awfully close to that bubble.

Spending Father's Day with your mistress likely will be a hard symbolism for his sons to swallow for years.

My heart breaks for his boys because there's nothing like feeling that your father loved another life more than you. Because even if he didn't cheat on his children, it sure can feel that way.

I am pushing 40 years old now, and I am thankful today that both of my parents have long been remarried happily, faithfully, to people they love. Which means that good can grow from sadness.

But it grows from hard work at it, namely through promises kept over the long haul of life.

We parents are terribly human. So our character reflects as brightly in how we handle ourselves after we've done wrong as when we do right. Perhaps more so.

Sanford's sons, like many of us, perhaps are watching to see what kind of character he demonstrates next. Witnessing a grown man weep and ramble on TV and grasp at King David comparisons does not create security for children.

His boys, and all children aware of this saga, need to see him get an adult grip on the situation he's created.

I hope that he's telling his boys that he loves them as much as he's been telling the rest of us how much he loves Maria.

His sons are darn lucky to have a mother who appears steadfastly devoted to providing them a home full of that uncompromising love and security. I hope Sanford soon remembers that providing this to his children is his life's single most important job as well.

Contact Jennifer Hawes at jhawes@postandcourier.com.