"[Michael Jackson] nurtured relationships, including with the boys’ mothers. He spent hours on the phone with James and Wade, he would also call their moms, just to talk to them."

"Jackson also spent time at the Safechucks’ modest home in Simi Valley, Calif. He could have been anywhere in the world, Stephanie Safechuck said, but he chose to be with them. 'He was a son I started to take care for,' Stephanie Safechuck said. 'He would spend the night, I’d wash his clothes.' She said that she once told Jackson that she had prayed for her son’s success in getting into commercials, and that he went on to find success right away. In response, she said, Jackson told her that he had prayed, too. He had prayed for a friend, and then he found James."

From "'Leaving Neverland': Viewers React With Shock at Disturbing Accounts of Life With Michael Jackson" (NYT).

I've watched about half an hour of this 4-hour documentary. I don't know if I will keep going, but if you've watched some or all of this, talk to me about your reaction to the mothers. They are still, after all these years, lit up and glowing.

I'm experiencing them as I'm absorbing the college admissions scandal, which challenges me to understand parents who experience their own emotions through their child and re-envision bad as good when it is — in some twisted way — seen as for the good of the child.

I've often entertained the thought that parenthood elevates a person into altruism — a mundane and relatively easy form of altruism, but altruism nonetheless. You must and so you probably will subordinate your own desires and pleasures for the sake of another person.

But in the college admissions scandal — and, perhaps, in "Leaving Neverland" — parenthood drives you further away from ethical behavior. You prioritize getting things for your child, and you feel urgent and justified, and you lose sight of right and wrong.

I've been thinking about this problem in light of that question from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "Is it OK to still have children?" If I were a young woman today — looking at Lori Loughlin and Stephanie Safechuck — I might think what a terrible risk it is to become a mother.