It's exhausting.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Mom-Shaming
As someone who once lost her two-year-old for a paralyzing eight minutes in Baltimore's bustling Harborplace, forgive me if I'm a little sympathetic to the doxed and shamed mom of the kid who fell into the gorilla pit at the Cincinnati Zoo, leading to the death of a beloved 17-year-old ape. I get it: The gorilla was just being a gorilla. They could/should have drugged him (although it would have taken ten minutes to take effect, and who knows what that ten minutes would have wrought). Online chatter went ballistic with everything from racist blather to calls for the lazy, incompetent mother to be jailed. The fact that the dad was there, too, is only mentioned occasionally. Because we all know that any accident befalling a child or bad behavior emanating from a child is 100% the mother's fault. Today, in 2016.
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> As someone who once lost her two-year-old for a paralyzing eight minutes in Baltimore's bustling Harborplace...
Wow. That must have been terrifying. Thanks for the perspective. It's easy to judge when something like the zoo incident happens.
Excellent point, too, about the focus on the mom, rather than both parents. The response to episodes like this reveals deep attitudes. We (or is just me?) seem to feel viscerally that mothers are more central to the caregiving of young children. Is that wrong? Not sure...
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