itsjustme...

You have chosen a bad metaphor. You are judging yourself for perceived "crimes" that are in your past. You are holding your feelings as evidence.

Life is not a trial. It is a journey. Our success is not measured in the number of mistakes we have made, but in how we move forward from those mistakes, and what changes we apply to our lives in response.

In some cases you are submitting your feelings as evidence. Even in a real trial, feelings are not evidence, cause, or defense. It is our actions as a result of those feelings that is important. Case in point, feeling frustrated concerning your son. Of course it is frustrating sometimes! You love him and want him to live a full life, and you are limited in what you can do to achieve that end, and that is frustrating. Sometimes I am sure the frustration exists on its own just from impatience. You cannot control that! You cannot control your feelings, they just are! What is important is what you do with those feelings!

Look at all the sad cases of people who hurt their children out of anger or frustration. They neglect them, hurt them, abuse them. In contrast look at your actions. You watch your temper and be careful what you say to him. You talk about it here to release some of the frustration in a safe environment that will help you without hurting him. You take parenting courses. You are working on getting counselling. Sometimes that may even mean giving yourself a break from the frustration so that you can better deal with it when you are caring for him. Not all of this may be successful all at once, the important thing is that you are seeking and working on solutions.

Here is a quote about courage that I believe fits equally well with frustration:
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave. ~Mark Twain

Good parenting is about dealing with frustration, not eliminating it (or hiding from it).

Likewise what SeptemberMorn said about your daughter... you made a mistake, and your heroism was in recognizing that and correcting it. I think having "mother/daughter days" was an incredible idea. Too many parents in this world would have never even recognized the problem, or seen it and thought it wasn't worth dealing with in the shadow of other tasks they faced. Yours was an incredible victory there!

I could go on about the other things you mention. Your friend from the hospital? It is always easy to predict the future once it has retreated into the past. 20/20 hindsight. She was obviously trying to hide it, she hid it from the hospital professionals, this was her action and her decision. In the end it had nothing to do with you, so don't blame yourself for it! Punishing yourself for not seeing something you couldn't see is like saying the reason you lost your car keys is because you couldn't remember where you put them. And it sure is easy enough to remember where you had put them the moment after you find them! D'oh!

There have been mistakes, we all have mistakes in our past. The crime is not remembering them, hiding them, and commiting them again with no desire or attempt to stop. You have done none of those things, in fact quite the opposite. Continuing the work on making yourself better will be the greatest gift and the greatest success you can give to your children.

It is likely that it may be hard to realize some of this, because of depression! No matter what we say, no matter what the "truth" is, your depression will always make you pick the most negative aspects from any thoughts despite knowledge to the contrary. Try to remember that, and at times it may just take faith to believe that things are not as bad as they seem they are.

One final quote:
Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow. ~Mary Anne Radmacher

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--http://www.idexter.com