It was August before his senior year, with football practice in full swing. But his position in the high school hierarchy did not reflect his adulthood. Even though I thought my hardest parenting was behind me, my true test was just a few hours away.

My husband and I never missed our kids’ events, it was the highlight of raising children – for us it to watch them succeed at the things they enjoy the most. But this Saturday morning would be unexpectedly different.

I arrived at the football field ready to watch the first scrimmage of the year, the beautifully poetic “beginning of the end” as he was starting to do all of his “lasts”. As the scrimmage ended, however, while the parents began to make their way back to their cars and I stood around to talk to the players and coaches something weird was happening. The team was sitting under the pine tree and the head coach was yelling, while no one seemed to know what was going on. All the sudden, my eldest son gets up and throws his helmet on the ground.

The next few minutes are somewhat fuzzy. What happened the night before was the cause for all of this. My nice, thoughtful, never-in-trouble son had gotten caught at a liquor store buying alcohol by the wrestling coach. The next few hours consisted of some crying and upset voices in our house. He had been suspended for half of his senior year football season. One of the things he loved the most had been taken away from him, at his own fault.

While he was attempting to grapple with how to react. I continued asking myself questions like “What should I do? What should his punishment from us be? Do we fight the suspension at school? How do we make this experience something he can learn from?”

Part of the issue was that I don’t completely agree with the athletic code of the school. I am not the biggest fan of such harsh rules in general, especially since I was not a steadfast follower of them myself when I was young. It is the subsequent suspension process that I dislike the most because it can sometime pit friends against friends, parents against school and parents against parents. I am not a fan of conflict, but the bottom line was he had broken a rule he knew about and knew what the consequences would be.

What amazed me in the end was that after talking with our son he was able to come up with his own form of redemption. He volunteered to speak at the athletic meeting that all freshman and parents must attend. There he was this big senior, big athlete, fighting back tears as he told his horrible story and on the side were his teammates some of them with tears too. What happened next was wonderful – he had parents coming up to him to thank him for telling his story because they have tried to get across to their own kids the importance of following the rules and what can happen if you don’t.

So unlike some families that try to avoid the limelight when things go wrong, we found strength in sharing our sadness of losing one-half of the football season, which makes feel like I have done something right (a feeling not often felt by a mother).