On my Instagram feed, my sons seemed like ideal kids, and I seemed like the perfect mom. Neither of those things was true.

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On Instagram, it might have appeared that my children's father and I did everything right when it came to parenting. My sons — who are now 25 and 27 — each earned their Eagle Scout, graduated high school, went to college, and based on the updates and pictures I posted, they probably seemed like perfect kids. The thing is, perfect doesn't exist and in the world of curated social media posts, one family's success story is often filled with quiet mistakes, secret crises, and untold moments of so-called failure. That was our story.