Mom-judgment was in full swing when the little boy fell into the gorilla enclosure earlier this month. On every website moms were judging, shaming, and downright blasting the little boy’s mom with hateful comments. (And no one blamed the dad, by the way.) I couldn’t imagine being that mother watching her son get dragged around by a 450-pound gorilla.
I tried to put myself in her shoes. It’s easy to say I would have held my son’s hand at the zoo, or made sure I was watching him at all times, but again, I wasn’t there. No one but the family will know exactly what happened. But the judgments came from all mom-angles, like accidents have never happened in their families and empathy was foreign to them. I suppose we all sat back and let the mom-bashing continue because the boy survived. Someday, if he remembers the incident, he’ll write a best selling book about it.
But isn’t it different when there’s a horrific tragedy like a child’s death? How do women not sympathize with a family who just lost their child to something they will forever blame themselves for?
Apparently, every mom in the Facebook comments section could have predicted that alligators live in Disney lagoons and they all would have made sure to keep their child away from the edge of the water (despite there being no signs warning of swimming gators). In hindsight, it’s easy to say, but I doubt this family had any clue there were gators in the water.
Surely, they didn’t think such a kid-friendly venue like Disney, especially on an outside movie night, could be a place for a gator to roar out of the water and snatch a person. If they had any inkling otherwise, don’t you think they would have been more careful? I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they weren’t neglectful parents.
Accidents happen. Terrible, awful tragedies that could have been avoided happen. They happen to everyone. They can happen to you today, tomorrow or at any moment.
But let’s say you’re a mom who will never experience an accident, or a tragedy, because you are so careful that you watch your child every second of every day, and you have superhuman qualities that allow you to predict the future. I still want you to do this exercise with me right now. If you only have one child, pretend you have two.
Close you eyes (after you read this paragraph). You are at Disney World and it’s movie night outdoors tonight; if you’re lucky, your kids will get to see some fireworks. That makes you happy. You and your husband take your children outside to the beach where it’s warm and muggy. The kids are happy, playing with each other, and then they split up momentarily. Your two-year-old walks to the edge of the water, where your husband watches him, and you turn your back for a moment to watch your four-year-old who is running in the opposite direction. All of a sudden you hear a splash, and when you turn around, you see your child in the mouth of an alligator while you husband is desperately trying to pry him loose.
Now, stop, and really picture your child like this… and just like that, your baby is gone in the water with the alligator. You can do nothing. Isn’t that the worst possible pain imaginable, despite whose fault you think it was?
This family will have to deal with their grief every day for the rest of their lives. I’d like us all to be more sympathetic to these poor parents who just lost their two-year-old son. If you’re a mom, and you have no compassion for this family, then there’s probably some sort of denial and fear that you are not dealing with.
What we should all be doing is petitioning for Disney to clear their waters of gators, or tell people not walk anywhere NEAR the water because it houses these dangerous creatures. Any gator could have come ashore just as quickly to snatch this child regardless if his toes were in the water or not.
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