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"Walk a mile another man's moccasins before you criticize him."
Native American Saying
The following is my response to this article about a young mother who went grocery shopping and left her two sons (ages 4 and 1) in the family car with the doors locked and the windows rolled up on an evening when the temperature was still in the high eighties.
Not only did this woman use bad judgment when it came to the conditions that she had left her boys unattended (this being true even if she were just running into the store for two or three items and wouldn't be gone over 15 minutes), but she also beat up the woman who tried to help her.
I see this as a case of two basically-good women. One of them was trying to be not just helpful but, also, a lifesaver to two little boys. The other one was trying to raise her boys while not feeling as if there were anyone she could turn to for help, and she now feared that she would lose both her boys and her job, so she lashed out at the Good Samaritan.
People who are struggling with life should never have to be afraid that somebody is going to intrude and take their kids away from them unless they were actually people who were perverted and sadistic--the type who use their kids for cheap thrills.
I find it to be a sad commentary on contemporary life that it has become fashionable to hate on others for what is even a petty reason to do so such as a person having an "unacceptable" body size or happening to be born the same nationality as one or more people who have turned out to be terrorists.
When something like this (a woman leaving her small children in a locked car with the windows rolled up on a hot day) comes along, we seem to feel even more "justified" in hating on her.
But does hating on this woman really solve the problem? NO!!! It only gives us a false sense of superiority, and having a false sense of superiority shouldn't be what it's all about. What it's all about should be about addressing problems and trying to solve them in as positive of a way as possible! It's about keeping a family together whenever possible instead of tearing them apart.
Anyway, this is what I wrote for a discussion thread for Facebook (where the article was shared):
I have some very mixed feelings here.
For starters, this woman (the mother) did a very wrong thing by leaving her kids in a hot, locked car, and it was right for the other woman to try to help.
However, I also understand why the mother reacted the way that she did--and her reaction (not a good one in spite of being an understandable one) was one brought on by a well-grounded fear resulting from the type of social climate that rears its ugly head today.
Believe it or not, this woman seems to love her sons and not want to lose them, and she saw this intervention as threatening.
She was trying to get her grocery shopping done and made a wrong judgment call. It's possible that she hadn't even left the boys in the car that long (still, a wrong judgment call due to the weather) and didn't plan to at the time that the woman spotted them, as she was on her way back out to the car shortly after that.
We have two choices here:
1. We can strip this mother of her children based on what happened that evening; possibly, send her to jail; and, likely, deprive her of employment (to help her to support her family) at a time when jobs are hard to find.
or
2. We can realize that this is a woman who loves her kids and is trying to keep all of their heads above water. She's struggling. What we need to do at this point is to ask her what can be done to help. We don't talk down to her. We talk to her friend-to-friend so that she realizes that we'd like to help instead of label her a bad person and throw her away.
Even if she were at a bar somewhere drinking while her kids were in the car, it's something better addressed as a cry for help. But, in this case, the woman WASN'T at a bar. She was, instead, trying to care for her family while feeling that there was nobody to help her.
She needs to feel safe when trying to seek help for her family. If she feels safe--like nobody's going to respond to her requests for help by taking her kids away--she will be able to go to an agency, ask for help, and receive what she needs to help her to see her way clear.
We're all in this together, and who's to say that the time won't come when we have to reach out to social services in order to help our family and/or ourselves over a rough patch!?!
Should that time come, would we want to be met with pointing fingers or extended hands?
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