Parenting & Family Quote by Susan Smith

Maternal devotion is supposed to be an unassailable moral alibi, and Susan Smith leans on it hard. The opening line, "I love my children. That will never change", tries to lock the reader into a familiar script: whatever happened, a mother’s love stands outside the evidence. It’s a preemptive bid for sympathy that treats feeling as fact, as if affection can erase consequence.

Then the sentence swerves into a revealing grammatical slip: "I have prayed to them for forgiveness". People pray for someone, or pray to God; praying to the children collapses the roles. It casts her children as both witnesses and judges, a move that sentimentalizes accountability while dodging the concrete audience that matters in her context: the public, the court, the victims’ family, the moral record. The phrasing invites a private, devotional frame for what is, unavoidably, a public atrocity.

"I never meant to hurt them!!" is where the intent shows its seams. The double exclamation points are not emphasis so much as desperation, a demand to be believed. The line shifts the argument from what she did to what she meant, trying to relocate guilt into the softer realm of accident and misunderstanding. It’s a classic rhetorical retreat: if intent can be blurred, responsibility can be negotiated.

In context - a woman convicted of killing her children after initially claiming a carjacking - the quote reads less like confession than damage control. Love becomes branding, prayer becomes PR, and forgiveness is framed as something she hopes to receive rather than something she meaningfully earns.