I saw a post on a popular and widely-read parenting website/blog yesterday and it made me sad. In it, a mother confessed that she loves her son more than her daughter.

She wrote about how she felt more comfortable with her son, and how it was so much easier to parent him. She wrote about how much she struggled with her feelings of disconnection with her 3-year-old girl.

That, in and of itself, was not what gave me so much distress, because this happens. Sometimes parents favor one child over the other. But she continued further, writing later in the post:

"There are moments – in my least sane and darkest thoughts – when I think it wouldn’t be so bad if I lost my daughter, as long as I never had to lose my son."

There are so many reasons why this post, and the enormous backlash it received in the comments section (more than 300 comments), was upsetting.

1) She was sharing her feelings in the interest of talking about motherhood and imperfection. She felt by writing about this openly other people would feel they could talk about it too. I get that. I just wish she had other outlets as well to help her through this, perhaps before she ever wrote about it publicly. Were there other people she could talk to, or was this website her only outlet? Did she have no one else to talk to?

2) Many of the comments were heartbreakingly awful, and sometimes mean, and I can't imagine what she must feel like right now. I feel sick to my stomach for her. I understand where some of those people were coming from. Some of them were "unfavored" childred in their own families, and were deeply scarred by that experience. It was, in my own small opinion, a mistake to publicly share some of the things this mom disclosed. Still, she said many times she was suffering, and seemed to be seeking reassurance rather than the anger she got. Could we have responded in ways that would lead her to help, rather than to feel, as she said in an update to the post, "shocked and ashamed"? Should we have?

3) I also can't imagine how it would feel to be her daughter and one day read some of the things that are written in this piece. The anguish!! The mother herself says she knows these feelings are wrong. She worries about them. But I also wish someone, maybe the website's editors, had said to her, "Maybe you can talk about this topic authentically and still leave the line about your daughter dying out. Or the line about hoping your next baby is a daughter because then maybe you'll be able to love that girl. Not because you don't feel it, or that you are not allowed to have your own feelings, but because some day your daughter could read it." Could someone have given her that guidance? Did they try to? Does anyone care about the feelings of this little girl?

4) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I'm not sure this relationship has to be this way forever. In the end, that's what is most important, right? It almost felt as though this mom had given up. I have to wonder if some sort of therapy or family counseling could really help.

It helped me.

My son and I are very similar. We have the same kind of personality. He is my oldest. It has always been very easy to parent him. At first I thought it was because I must have some kind of super awesome parenting skills, but no … it's because he's a great kid and also because I understand him at a very deep level. We're almost one in the same in many ways.

My daughter and I are very different. It is hard for me to understand her, because she makes decisions I wouldn't. While I am very safety-conscious, she is ready to jump off things and fly through the air unharnessed. While I am often fairly low energy, she is nonstop action, chattering and singing away and running from here to there. My husband calls her a fabulous punch to the solar plexus of the universe, and he's right.

At first, she scared the living daylights out of me. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't understand why she behaved the way she did. She made me nervous. I wasn't sure how to connect with her the way I was connected with my son. It's like we both spoke different languages.

Then I talked to my therapist about it, because I love this little girl as fiercely as I love my boy and I didn't want a problem to begin right from the start. The therapist acted as my translator. She explained to me that, personality-wise, my son was a fit. He is easy for me, and I am for him, because we think alike and we behave alike. Not so with my daughter, so I needed to learn to understand her and appreciate her for who she was. It was my job to do that. She helped me see that it wasn't that my "preshy" didn't like me or was defying me or was trying to scare the living daylights out of me (like the time she left our house at the age of two by herself and walked a couple of football fields away off into a golf course without ever looking back over her shoulder … can you imagine?!). She's just a free spirit. A beautiful, wonderful free spirit.

I can work with that. I am working with that. I'm learning to see life through Preshy's eyes. The world is one big amusement park as far as she is concerned. My boy is not perfect or better because he's like me. My daughter is not perfect or better because she isn't. And neither of them are less than anything. They're just different.

I'm not saying my situation is exactly like that of the mom who wrote the post. I don't know all the details of her life and everything that may have brought her to this spot. I just know what it feels like to be confounded by your child, and that sometimes people can help you reframe that thinking in a constructive way … a way that allows you to move forward positively and have a wonderful relationship.

Note: I hope you don't mind me writing about this today, rather than PPD. I just felt so overwhelmingly awful on so many levels after reading the post and comments that I wanted to put it down on paper, and to share my own experience so that maybe mothers who don't know how to connect to children that are "different" than they might see that it's possible.

Also, I don't link to the post here for a reason. I just want to be careful not to add more fuel to the fire that has already flamed over at the website. What's more important to me is the issue, rather than the specific people. I hope that makes sense.