Painful Reality About Parenting
Almost every night, before I go to sleep, I pad through the kitchen into my daughter’s room. As I stand at her crib and try to memorize her angelic face, I tell myself I am making sure she has not thrown off the covers.
The truth is, I am making sure she is still there.
I have sickening fantasies of walking in and finding an empty crib. Or worse.
This worrying, I suppose, is a prime occupational hazard of parenting. The line between concern and paranoia is a thin one. Just when you think you are being ridiculous and overprotective, you hear about a child being snatched from her room. Or from a shopping mall. Or from her gated yard.
For me, the fretting started as soon as I realized the egg had been fertilized. Back then, the concern was navigating the months until birth. I remember moaning to a doctor when I was newly pregnant: “I am so worried all the time. Do you think I’ll be more relaxed after the first trimester?”
He chuckled. “No,” he said. “You can plan on feeling this way for the next 18 years.”
Now that I have a child, I wonder: Why did he think the worrying ever stops?
Like liberty, the price of parenthood is eternal vigilance.
*
Most adults--and certainly people in the news business--have developed strong enough emotional filters that allow terrible deeds to be rationalized away as things that happen to “other people.”
But parenthood seems to ulcerate that filter.
I have been winded by the sorrow and pain I feel for children who are deliberately hurt by others. Suddenly, the defense mechanism is totally rusted out. We are not different. We are not protected. We are not immune.
What used to annoy me about people who refused to follow the news--”too depressing”--now strikes me as a perfectly reasonable coping strategy.
Early this year, it was the story of James Bulger that made me want to double up. James, 2, was led out of a Liverpool shopping mall he was visiting with his mother by two 10-year-old boys, who forced him to walk several miles before beating him to death. Over and over, I pictured a terrified little boy, the witness who assumed he was walking with his older brothers, and no one to protect him from the ultimate horror.
Last month, it was 8-year-old Nicole Parker, playing safely behind the gates of her father’s apartment complex in Woodland Hills. Sodomized and strangled, police believe, by a 22-year-old neighbor.
And finally, and unbearably, last week, Polly Klaas.
What I cannot erase from my mind’s eyes are these pictures . . . of a child about to be killed, the lost opportunities for salvation, the parents who have just been given the worst possible news.
These grisly stories force us to confront what we simply cannot bear: that children are not safe at their mothers’ sides, not safe inside locked gates, not safe in their own homes.
Which is why I have to check on the baby just one more time before bedtime.
*
The deaths of Polly and Nicole remind me why--especially now that I am consumed with keeping a child safe--the California death penalty isn’t something I care to devote much energy to agonizing over.
Mere death does not achieve justice. If we could induce in the killers the same feelings of terror and betrayal they caused their young victims, that would be a good place to start.
I am not a religious person and could never find solace in the notion that children are taken for a reason. I don’t believe prayer can reverse events.
But I do believe in the human capacity for evil. And in the redemptive power of human goodness. I do believe that the pain of a child’s murder can be assuaged by the faith that something good will come of tragedy. This is the spirit that animates the calls out of Petaluma for justice system reform.
Someone in that town, I read last week, left an angel doll at a sidewalk shrine with a note that said, “Polly, you are the most beautiful angel now.”
I am not sure what an angel is exactly, but there is great comfort in imagining Polly and Nicole and James, and all children whose lives have been taken violently, as lithe spirits, hovering somewhere in our memories, out of pain and at peace.
