Two years ago today, three-year-old Madeline McCann was allegedly kidnapped from her hotel room in Portugal while vacationing with her family. This story is all over the news this morning, bringing up the emotions I felt when I first heard it: anger, sadness, resentment, RAGE. All directed at the mother. What were you thinking? How could you and your husband go off that night, leaving your sleeping daughter in the hotel room? Who does that??
I expected to find out that she and her husband were responsible for the kidnapping, or that the whole thing was a hoax. But here we are, two years later, and the McCanns are no longer suspects in the disappearance of little Maddie. They still appear on the news with their long, sullen faces, seemingly desperate to find their daughter.
Where is my empathy? Is this is a mother who simply made a terrible, horrible choice that night? Why don’t I blame the father as much as I blame the mother? Why do I immediately blame anyone at all? Why wasn’t my initial reaction: “That poor mother!” instead of “That stupid mother!”?
Why are we so quick to judge rather than empathize and support? Why are we so nurturing and fiercely protective of our own children, but when it comes to other moms and their children, we seem to go immediately to a place of blame and anger? Is this to make ourselves feel better about our own parenting? Is this a conscious choice we make, or simply how we as mothers are wired?
Lapses of Judgment
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2 Comments
Agree with you entirely, Joelle. Isn’t it funny (and not in a ha-ha funny kind of way) how we as moms naturally start with blame, then think about it and settle into compassion. I wonder if we are wired that way, as women, and we’ve always been like that? Or if it’s another one of those things that suddenly started happening when we became mothers.
When I first read the stories this week, my first thoughts were: where was the babysitter while all this was happening? Then I read further and discovered there was no babysitter. They had just left the children alone. They left three little children under the age of 4 ALONE? How could they? What were they thinking? What selfish parents!
Then I began to think about it a little more.
First of all, any criticism we heap on this poor mother is only a fraction of what’s she’s heaped on herself over the years. Two years later, and she and her husband are valiantly keeping this story alive and in the news. They’re a British couple, yet we in the United States are intimately familiar with the story. As a PR professional, I know how tough it is to sell a story and keep it alive. Yet, the mountain of their grief (and yes, probably guilt) is pushing them to keep this child’s story in the news.
Then I began to think of the real practical logistics of it. Here they are on holiday. They have twins. Egads. I have one child, and often feel overwhelmed. With three children that small, and two of them twins. Sheesh. Imagine how exhausted these two parents feel. They just wanted to have a relaxing dinner with friends. It was their vacation. They’re one chance to relax. They work so hard all year long, and now they get a chance to have some fun.
Now, think about that they were 100 feet away. My husband and I vacationed in Lake Tahoe this summer wth our 18-month-old son and another family. We estimated that our cabins were about 100 feet apart. While we never left our son alone after bed time, it wasn’t inconceivable that we might slip away for a little while to play a game of cards with the other family. We didn’t, but not because we were afraid of animal getting him or another person. We didn’t because I was worried that if he woke up, we couldn’t hear him and he might get scared in an unfamiliar setting.
So, after much thought, I came around. My anger at the mother loosened into compassion. We all have lapses in judgement from time to time when it comes to our kids. Imagine if one of those lapses ended up seriously injuring our child; or, god forbid, resulted in our child’s death. We could never forgive ourselves.
Joelle