One can’t expect to get things right on the first try, and that seems especially true for parenting. As a parent, you do the very best you can to prepare yourself for the little scrapes and bruises that life—and sometimes other people—deals out. However, there’s little to prepare you for a day in which your little person is the giver of such a hurt.

I think the best thing one can do from the situation is patch up the wounds and make an attempt at a very serious understanding that hurting people is not a good thing and that sadly, hurting people doesn’t take a whole lot of effort sometimes. The most difficult things tend to become second nature after just being alive for long enough that you lose perspective until it walks up and slaps you in the face. As a parent this happens often and there’s no panacea.

Parents who have been through the younger years offer advice and there’s some value to it, just as this outpour of feeling would be to someone reading it that might be going through the same thing. I could overanalyze this isolated event and obsess as some do but life’s moving forward and I’ve no choice but to adapt, observe and evolve.