How do you love?

I don't have kids yet but I can already feel how it's going to be when one of my children falls away from everything they know and believe for temporal pleasures and experiences. I now have just a glimpse of what my mom went through with me. I can bet it consumed her every thought and tore her apart to see me making horrible, scary and life changing choices. Looking back I feel like she handled everything perfectly. She isn't the type of person to barge into my life and force me to do anything. She told me what her expectations were and from there, I made my choices. She would discipline me for minor things like schooling or curfew but I had a lot of freedom to make my own choices. Although she did intervene in the extreme cases.

It took me a long time to figure out what my morals and standards were. Unfortunately I tend to be the kind of thick headed person that usually has to experience things to know for sure if they are bad or good. I usually take the test before getting the lessons. I absolutely admire those kind of people that already know what their morals are and are firm in their beliefs. Tyler's family is a supreme example of this. They are amazing people. There is no grey area. Either it's right or it's wrong.
It kills me to think that people think that experiencing something is the ONLY way to know if it's something they want. Does history teach us nothing? We are not put on this earth alone. We are not meant to struggle and suffer alone. We are here to learn and teach each other things that we might not know on our own.

It's so easy to love and support somebody when they are doing the right thing. When they are making good healthy choices and when you know they are truly happy. So how do you love someone when they aren't doing those things? It's easy to say that you just need to "be there for them and let them figure it out" but how are you supposed to actually DO those things?
When someone you know is making dumb and potentially soul sucking choices. When their whole attitude and personality changes it's hard to even be around them. When you can tell that they aren't really there with you in the moment because they are thinking about their other, cool, new and exciting life. How do you deal with that?
Even though they have seen you and other people close to them make these same choices and see how horrible things turned out for you and how those choices led to nothing but tears and regrets. How do you love them?
When they ask you questions about your past, do you answer them? Do you lie? Do you just avoid the question?
When you are with them and they start talking about the things they are trying and the people they associate with, do you just listen or tell them that you don't want to hear it? That it makes you sick to think of them doing these things.
Are you supposed to tell them that the new friends they have are not really friends at all or just let them learn on their own? Can you tell them that when or if they decide on a different path in life that these "friends" will not be there anymore?

How can you love a person when everything you knew about that person and the reasons why you loved them, are no longer traits that person carries?

How do mothers do it?

It's times like these that makes me REALLY hate the adversary. To take a perfectly beautiful, innocent child of god, and totally and utterly crush their foundation and make them question themselves. For him to come along and turn an amazing and completely trusting person into a cynical, questioning and doubtful human. It's not right. I shouldn't be like this.
There is such a difference in fleeting happiness and pure joy. Why doesn't EVERYONE know this? There are people all over the place that say you need to live and learn and experience. Is that just a way to justify the wrong things they are doing? Frankly, it's a cop out.
I am not a mother yet but I feel so much pain for someone who I feel I have had a part in raising.
Really, I feel like all of this my fault.