The Darkest Moment of My Life Got Posted on the Internet for All to See. Now I Have a New Fear.

Care and Feeding Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by zoka74/Getty Images Plus and Stanisic Vladimir/Adobe Stock. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. Dear Care and Feeding, Ten years ago, I hit a bad patch and made a series of terrible decisions in a short amount of time. One of those decisions was that I pulled over my car to ask two local sex workers if they wanted to hang out and do drugs. One of them was actually a cop, and I was arrested. While I was sitting on the curb in cuffs waiting to be taken away, one of my former students (I had been a high school teacher at the time, though this happened during the summer break ) took a photo of me and disseminated it far and wide. I was a local meme. I do not harbor ill will about this. I was an idiot and made major mistakes. And, yeah, it is objectively funny to see your high school teacher busted for solicitation. But because of the meme, the internet remembers all about “Mr. Jones” and his no good, very bad day. I’ve gotten sober and gotten my life back on track. A decade later, I’ve got a successful career, a wife who loves me, and as of two months ago, a beautiful baby. Here’s my question: I’m afraid about how this is going to affect his life because of the Meme of It All. (Unfortunately, my name is a lot more uncommon than “Jones.” Things get dicey halfway down the first page of my Google results.) (We gave my son my wife’s last name for this reason.) I obviously am not a teacher anymore, and my current career is very friendly to redemption stories, so I haven’t really had much practice disclosing this. (My wife knew me before this happened and married me anyway, if you can believe it.) I’m really nervous about my kid making friends and their parents Googling me and then dumping my kid. I mean, he’s an infant, I know we’re a few years off from this. But I’m kind of obsessed with it. I don’t want my mistake to mess up his social life or get him bullied. I figure we’ll talk about my past eventually, but the idea of his friends or their parents telling him first or judging him for my mistake makes me queasy. How can I deal with this? —Better Now Dear Better Now, Ugh. Man, do I feel this in my bones. As someone who also has a very unsavory, Googleable past, I’ve experienced the same levels of intense regret and paranoia you are. I’m 10 years removed from my public disgrace (10 years sober, as well), but every time my email address shows up on a parent list from our kids’ school, I wince, because I’m convinced every mom and dad is Googling me, trashing me in the WhatsApp chat, and then blacklisting my kids from playdates for all eternity. The good news is that hasn’t happened yet, or it has, and I don’t know about it. What others think about me is not important, but on some days, it does feel like I’m fighting through a room full of ghosts who want to suffocate me with shame. I fight through it, though, and survive, simply because I remind myself that I’m no longer that broken person, and I’m truly becoming a better parent, husband, and human because I went through that. From now on, try to embrace your past as the starting point of who you are today. Your experience (even a painful, embarrassing one) can be valuable to others, to help someone else who could be in a similar predicament (or worse). Now you have the unique opportunity to help guide them through it, perhaps even save them from a despair only a handful of humans can understand. You are one of the lucky ones who can navigate those depths and pull someone out. I’ll tell you this, too: Take pride in your name. You got through something, survived a real bullet to the brain here, and you’re at the onset of a remarkable growth stage. Use the next decade to teach your son that mistakes are lessons. You can help him understand humility, grace, and empathy. You have a wonderful opportunity not only to come back from this, but to be someone very special to your family and the rest of the world. Email me—I could use your help sometimes. —A.J. More Parenting Advice From Slate I am mom to a 7-month-old. We live in a pretty conservative area, and I work in a male-dominated industry. In fact, all of my co-workers are men who have or had stay-at-home wives. When I was pregnant, several of my co-workers did not expect me to come back to work. Though I told them we planned on using day care, I guess they assumed some maternal instinct would come over me and I’d quit. They said terrible things to me, like how they’d be worried day care would let their child cry all day. I need a script for when people express their condolences about our child care… Never miss new Slate Advice columns Get the latest from Prudie and our columnists in your inbox each weekday, plus special bonus letters on Saturdays. Advice Family Kids