If the recent terrible events at the Cincinnati Zoo are any indication, there is one unmitigated truth that is crystal clear to all: There are an awful lot of people who are, at least from a distance, pretty good at raising other folks' kids.
As is typically the case in these matters, we have moved well past regretting the tragic necessity of killing a rare gorilla in an effort to keep him from harming a small boy who had climbed into the ape's enclosure, and we've settled neatly on assigning blame. In this case, that blame is landing squarely on the child's mother, who made the "horrific mistake" of looking away for a split second to attend to her other children.
I mean, if you can't simultaneously concentrate on four children at a time, what kind of a parent are you?
We have a name for people who have never had a 3-year-old bolt from their grasp at an inopportune and dangerous moment, have never realized mid-bounce on the trampoline that they've just turned their kid into a projectile or that, halfway down had the thought that, hmmm, this hill sure seems a lot steeper than when I and my children took off on the sled.
We call those people "childless."
Look, I'm the king of telling other people what to do, particularly when I have little to no skin in the game. But I draw the line in the sandbox at instructing other people on how to manage their kids.
After all, I'm the guy who once, right after the birth of my youngest daughter, walked off and left her in the stroller at a neighborhood picnic. At the time, my sleep-deprived brain seemed to believe that was a fine idea. After all, there were lots of mothers there, and it's never too early for your child to begin learning independence. In retrospect, yeah, six weeks is a little soon.
You want to turn a Noble Prize-winning nuclear physicist into a babbling idiot? Hand him a screaming 2-year-old on an airplane and tell him to quiet the infant down. They don't want to hear about splitting the atom there, Einstein. They just want to become a small, much-less green version of the Incredible Hulk.
I have, irrationally, promised my kids ski trips to Switzerland and Jaguars (the car, not the jungle cat. But if it would have shut them up, I might have tried to pet the Really Big Kitty) if they'd just quit screaming and allowed me to finish up the four full hours of shuteye it looked like I was going to get that night.
Children are delightful, lovable, huggable walking hazard magnets. Their survival and, frankly, the continued existence of our species is a testimony not so much to anyone's parenting skills but, indeed, pure dirty-diaper-house luck.
Once upon a time, the Lovely Mrs. Smith and I pulled into our driveway just in time to see that our then 5-year-old youngest daughter (same one as earlier -- there is definitely something about that kid) had climbed out of her second-story bedroom window onto the roof and was sitting on the edge, swinging her feet over the side, roughly 75 feet up in the air. OK, more like 20, but, from the car, it seemed like all of 75.
At that point, with older siblings assigned to watch her nowhere in sight, we calmly turned to each other and accessed our options. We decided that we could A) exit the vehicle in a nonchalant manner, stroll to the house and offhandedly suggest to our daughter that she should probably climb back in, B) sneak in the side door, climb quietly to the bedroom window and try to bribe her back inside with the promise of ponies and ice cream, or C) turn to each other and, with the car windows securely rolled up, begin screaming incoherently and flail our hands around.
We picked C. Followed by D) trying to strangle ourselves with seat belts before slamming our heads into our respective, partially-opened doors in our haste to tumble out in the yard like a couple of clowns exiting that small car at the circus.
Meanwhile, our daughter had gotten bored with the whole deal, climbed back into the house and was watching some Disney movie for the 300th time.
We, of course, were not alone. I remember seeing our next-door neighbor sprinting down the driveway frantically waving his arms and yelling because he had just realized his two oldest sons had decided "playing with your younger brother" meant getting him to lay down at the end of the makeshift ramp they had just built while they jumped over him with their bikes.
Kids spend most of their young lives blithely writing (often on the walls and furniture with crayons or indelible markers) checks their tiny, adventurous bodies can't cash. Parents spend a great deal of their time trying to beat those checks to the bank. When it doesn't work out, there is no one in the world who can be harder on them than they are on themselves.
Not, apparently, that there aren't a lot of people who seem to want to try.
Commentary on 06/10/2016