A news article prompted this blog. It breaks my heart to read the news. Every single day there is something disturbing in regards to a child or children. Most days when I scroll through the social media sites and see articles pertaining to children, I have to keep going and not read them…not because I don’t care, but because I care too deeply. The words on the pages of those articles haunt me for days and depress me. I truly just can’t. Children and the elderly will forever hold a soft spot in my heart. They are fragile and dependent upon us to take care of them. They both need loving, understanding, and caring arms to feel safe…they not only need it, but deserve it.
Today’s article was about a 43-year-old woman who left her 3-year-old daughter with a couple of strangers at a Budget Inn so she could go get drunk. She lied to the couple, while her little girl was crying and hanging onto her mother’s legs, and told them she would only be gone twenty minutes and was actually gone for almost three hours. Can you imagine how that child felt being left behind as she begged her mother not to go?
Now, while I am generally not a dramatic person and by no means try to throw the book at people over every little story I read because I was not present and do not know all circumstances involved, this person deserves to lose their child. In my opinion, she should never get this child back and should spend a substantial amount of time behind bars for child neglect.
First of all, she left that poor baby with strangers. Neither the mother, nor the child had any idea who these people were. They were apparently pretty honest people as the child was still there and unharmed. However, it could have just as easily been a totally different story. They could have been pedophiles, human traffickers, drug dealers, or just plain terrible human beings with no regard for human life, much less children and could have just left her there alone or worse. And this, so the woman could go get drunk.
Secondly, as a parent, as soon as your child enters this world..it is no longer about you. You have created another human being that is not capable of taking care of themselves and it is your responsibility to do so. There should be nothing you need to do and nowhere you need to go that your child shouldn’t be able to go with you. If it is somewhere they don’t need to be, more than likely, you shouldn’t be there either. If you do not realize that, and your habits are more than you can control to the point of leaving your child with strangers to get your fix, there are only more drastic measures to come. This time it was strangers (which is bad enough). What happens next time? This has been made public knowledge now. Her face plastered all over the news so she knows if she gets the child back she can’t pull the same stunt again. So, what happens next time?
I see a couple of possibilities here. One, she goes to rehab and follows all the steps to a better life and earns her child back and lives happily ever after. This, however, is a more realistic possibility with a younger parent. Someone that screwed up but hasn’t been screwed up for too terribly long and has a chance at recovery. This lady is 43, has probably had issues for the duration of her adult life with alcohol and/or drugs, and at this point it is just who she is.
Two, she takes even more drastic measures next time. The child gets left home alone or she decides to dispose of the child altogether. Eliminate the burden. While I am sure some of you are reading this and thinking I am being ridiculous/taking this too far…we see this every day. Every day people who never should have had children, have children. Those with mental disorders or drug/alcohol addictions and, therefore, altered state of mind don’t deal with the responsibility very well. There are usually signs that get ignored long before the actual horrific, front-page event takes place. They do things that are screaming ‘I need help’. We have to start paying attention to the signs. Help these people by taking these children out of their hands before it is too late.
As a mother, you literally grow a human being, a piece of you inside yourself for almost a year. That unconditional love and unbreakable bond is natural. If you don’t feel that, something is automatically off. If you are leaving your precious, beautiful, fully impressionable, very dependent little girl with strangers and see absolutely nothing wrong with it…you have ZERO business with a child. If there are no warning signals going off in your mind about what might happen to your child while left with those people you do not know, there is something not happening in your mind that should be. This is not normal. This is not okay. If our society does not wake up and start acting on those signs we keep ignoring, we are doomed to only get worse…to fail. Where are our morals? Where are our wholesome values? Where is our great country? Where is our humanity?
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