Illness, forgiveness, defensiveness and getting the internet to do my homework

Linnea has been asleep since about 13:00, which means she relaly must be ill. She has a snotty nose and some interesting new spots on her tummy, which don't appear to bother her at all. She doesn't have a temperature, so we're assuming benignity until she seems actually unwell. At the moment, she just has the runniest nose in the history of the universe and a strong need for sleep.

So I knitted until my hands hurt, made flapjacks, chatted to Rob (with Linnea asleep, he can work downstairs with me), and read a bunch of stuff online and in books.

And I have the beginnings of a thought, which I'm going to try to flesh out here. It's this: It is good to forgive oneself, generally, since dwelling on one's wrongdoing rarely promotes loveliness throughout the universe, but a vast swathe of people are taking this a step too far - they go from forgiving themselves bad behaviour to defending their bad behaviour as acceptable or justifiable.

The thought kind of stops there, with "and it's not, it's bad behaviour, and just because it's forgivable doesn't make it good," but I feel that it could be fleshed out somewhat, by someone without a headache.

And after that we can go on to "people who make themselves feel good about bad behaviour by claiming that it's right and that people not behaving that way are wrong" if we like.

(Why yes, I do read online parenting fora, why do you ask?)

Oh, and if any of you read offline parenting magazines, let me know a good title; I have finally decided to submit some of those articles you folks said I should submit a few months ago (Mothers and how they hurt each other, for one). If you don't help me, I shall have to get Linnea and a buggy up the stairs in the library and find the periodicals section. Last time I was faced with that prospect, I self-published a book. Be warned!