HORRIBLE: You hear parents talk all manner of drama about the parenting experience -- it's "the greatest thing ever," "I just didn't know I could ever love anything that much," and "it's the hardest and best thing I've ever done."

Most of it is true. Heck, it's all true. Some weird chemical courses through your bloodstream once your kid is born -- you're fuel-injected with this parental awe and wonder -- and every time you try to put it in words you sound all Dr. Phil.

But here's another new and weird thing about being a parent: You get a whole new channel of empathy in the DIRECTtv box of your emotions. You read a story like this -- two kids dead after five hours in a sweltering SUV -- and it not only rips your heart out of your chest, which happens to even non-parents, but it constricts your lungs, drop-kicks your stomach, and makes you chew on the inside of your mouth. It's empathy, because you know what a fundamental thing it is to love your child, and what kind of a haunting will be visited upon these parents.

Before you had kids, you felt bad for the victims. Now you know they're all victims, and maybe the dead were the lucky ones.

UPDATE: I read through the above post, and I keep thinking, Wait, what about these parents...maybe they didn't have enough love, didn't feel that fundamental feeling, because otherwise...how could they? And where's my anger at these parents, that they could let these two kids die? Maybe that will come, but that's just not my first feeling. My first thought was actually, "Where's my son?", and then I remembered that he's safely tucked into his crib for the morning nap. Then I thought, God, never never never leave him in the car. (Even though I already know that, life just moves so fast with the boy, so it's not inconceivable...well, it is inconceivable I'd forget him for hours, but for minutes?) And then came fear, the fleeting image of forgetting my son in the car, and then empathy, because how can these parents live with this? It used to be that contemplating my own mortality was tail-chasing sweatfest, but that's nothing compared with contemplating the mortality of your child. File under Don't Go There, I guess.