Pointing Fingers? or Extended Hands?

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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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This Is NOT The Time For Procrastination!!!

Sometimes, I think that the word, procrastination, was coined with me in mind.

However, I DO have an excuse for procrastinating:  I have so many things going on that they all have to take a number and wait.  This means that some things get done promptly, while other things get done not quite so promptly--or not promptly at all.  When certain things get done later than sooner, I'm seen by others (and even myself) as procrastinating.


What I'm talking about in this blog-entry is one of those things where there should be no procrastination if at all possible and, if not, as little as possible.


I want to tell you about what it's like living in my skin at this particular moment.  It's the skin of a person living with lymphedema--and during one of those not-so-good times that I'm dealing with surface wounds from blistering.  In order for these wounds to close before they become deep and infected, I'm having to spend more time in bed than on the computer at this time.


However, I believe that this is something that must be shared here before I can even think of getting back into bed.

In other words I mustn't procrastinate when it comes to sharing this very important message!!!


As I've just said, I know what it's like to live in the skin of somebody who deals with that chronic condition known as lymphedema--or, at least, I know what it's like for me.  However, I don't know what it's like to live in the skin of a child-abuser.  However, there seems to be plenty of people who have or do live in these skins.  I'm also blessed to have never lived within the skin of an abused child--except for on three occasions that I can think of, and none of the abuse came from family members.


Here are those three times:


(1) Hit hard on the top of the head by one teacher when I was four years old.
(2) Hit hard on the top of the head by another teacher when I was nine or ten years old.
(3) Forced (by two teachers) to participate in that dreadful game known as Red Rover.


A little later down the page, I'm going to share a video--and let me warn you that most of the pictures are pretty graphic.  They would make my three personal cases of child-abuse look pretty petty in comparison.


However, let me state here that my three cases of child-abuse were neither petty nor trivial.


No child should think "I was only tasered by a cop when I was throwing a tantrum, but it could have been worse, so I have no right to complain."


No child-abuse should be trivialized.  No child should be told to suck it up.


Some people think that the solution to stop child-abuse is stiffer prison sentences.  There are even some of the "some people" who would like to see the death penalty (which I personally oppose 100% of the time) be a possibility.


While I think that there are people who have gone so far downhill that they need to be restrained in order to keep the rest of society safe, I don't really think in terms of punishment for the sake of punishment--that is, to separate the "good" people from the "bad" people.  I'm more interested in making bad behavior stop than I am in the punishment mindset.


Although there will, likely, always be a need to keep some people separated from mainstream society, I think our prisons are far too full of people who have been sent there when problems would have better been solved by resources that didn't involve incarceration.


First, however, we have got to encourage people to take advantage of those resources when they need to.


Here is a favorite resource of mine:  Parents Anonymous


Parents who join a local group of this organization get the kind of help they need when it comes to coping with parenthood.

Sounds like a great deal--so, why aren't more child-abusers showing up to take advantage of this?

Simple!

They aren't ready to see themselves as failures when it comes to parenting--and they shouldn't have to!

If they were to go to Parents Anonymous meetings, they wouldn't find a bunch of failures there.  Nobody in that organization is interested in finger-pointing, and they don't see these parents as failures or "bad" people.

Most parents don't want to be "bad" people or failures.  None of us (parents or not) want to be bad people or failures.

The parents who don't take advantage of organizations like Parents Anonymous when they either feel as if they're about to lose it or else already have are the ones who don't want to have to face the facts that they are bad and/or failures (their own perception of themselves helped along by our judgmental society), so they think, I'll do better next time.  However, they end up doing worse, and, now, they're really ashamed.

Instead, they need to think:  I'm having these feelings, but that doesn't make me a bad person or a failure.  However, I need to get help in coping before I do something to my kids that I'll really be sorry for.

If people would just understand that good people can do bad things, if they don't have the resources to help them through bad patches, they would be more willing to get professional help, and everybody would end up better for it.

April is Child-Abuse Awareness Month.  However, we should be aware of this issue and doing what we can to make it stop 24/7 and 365.

If you're having trouble coping, please don't be hesitant to get help.

If you notice that a friend or family member is having trouble coping, do what you can to lighten their load, and show them this page.


When encouraging another person to seek help, talk to them as an equal instead of placing yourself high above them and looking down on them.


You might not have "been there" yourself, but imagine what it would be like to be so overwhelmed that you're ready to take it out on anything that's handy from the cat to the crying baby.  If you were to find yourself feeling that way, how would you feel?  Likely, that's how the person who's actually feeling that way is feeling.


If we were quicker to extend hands than to point fingers, I believe a lot of child-abuse would never ever get around to happening--and, when it comes to child-abuse, that's an act we should procrastinate on indefinitely!