Stop Mommy Shaming over the Gorilla Incident [View all]

[pnwmom]

Last edited Tue May 31, 2016, 08:28 PM - Edit history (4)

I remember the time my eyes opened up to how incredibly easy it would be to slip up as a parent -- with tragic consequences.

I was carrying my baby in one arm, reaching for the stair railing as my foot felt for the step below -- and somehow, for that instant, I lost my balance.

I regained it -- but in that instant I'd had the sudden vision of my baby being pitched out of my arm and headfirst down the stairs.

After that, I never just walked down the stairs with a child again. I always made a full stop at the top of the stairs, and then grabbed the handrail, and then carefully, deliberately, walked down the stairs.

But would I have ever condemned a parent who had dropped a baby going down the stairs? Never. I would have just felt grateful that it hadn't been me.

So I heartily agree with this dad's essay:

http://time.com/4352116/cincinnati-zoo-gorilla-harambe-mother/

But the real venom was directed at the mother. A Change.org petition—dubbed, inevitably, “Justice for Harambe”—read in part: “We the undersigned actively encourage an investigation of the child’s home environment in the interests of protecting the child and his siblings from further incidents of parental negligence that may result in serious bodily harm or even death.” Within two days after the incident, it had collected 313,000 of the 500,000 signatures it was seeking.

Then, Twitter did what Twitter does: it weaponized the ugliness. “I am SICK&TIRED of LAZY people who do not WATCH THEIR CHILDREN,” read one post. “[A] gorilla got killed because of a stupid child and his moron parents,” read another. And because no public debate is complete until celebrities have their say, there was Ricky Gervais tweeting, “It seems that some gorillas make better parents than some people.” D.L. Hughley, for his part, said this: “If you leave your kid in a car you go to jail, if you let your kid fall into a Gorilla Enclosure u should too!”

SNIP

Children, however, don’t play by those kinds of rules. They are the electrons in the nuclear family—kinetic, frenetic, seemingly occupying two or three places at the same moment, and drawn irresistibly to the most dangerous things in their environment. Wrangling a single child is a process of quick reflexes and constant vigilance; wrangling several of them—as Gregg was reportedly doing at the precise moment her son slipped away from her—is exponentially harder.

It speaks sweetly to human nature that we are so drawn to protect children. A lost toddler wails in a mall and a dozen grownups converge to help. And it’s a manifestly good thing that as a culture we’ve grown much more alert to the plight of kids for whom the home is the least safe place in the world. Child protective services exist for a reason. But protecting children from harm is not the same as attacking sometimes-grieving parents who work mightily, every day, to prevent that harm from coming.

Having a child—even just expecting a child—means being at least a little bit afraid for the rest of your entire life. The tiny cracks in time in which accidents happen—the millisecond before and after a child falls in a museum or tumbles into an animal enclosure—are sometimes impossible to foresee. Fearing the loss or severe injury of your own child is bad enough, thank you very much, without fearing the public shaming that can follow.