By now, many of us know of the horrendous murders of two beautiful young children in their Manhattan apartment, and the mother who discovered their bodies and watched as the perpetrator stabbed herself as she walked in.
It's hard to find words to describe how this mother, with her third child alongside, must have felt -- and will feel forever. It's hard because it has never happened to me, nor most other parents and we are beyond thankful for this.
The story has been plastered all over the newspapers and the internet. A mom takes her three-year-old child to swimming lessons, leaving her other children in the hands of trusted nanny who was very well-known to her and who had worked with them for two years.
The family had visited the nanny's homeland. They'd stayed with her family.
In general, they had enjoyed the close bond that is formed between parents and the person charged with taking care of that which is most precious to them -- their children.
Dad, an entertainment executive, was traveling for work and on his way home. The nanny was due to meet Mom when swim class ended with the other children so they could proceed on to dance lessons.
Nanny did not show so Mom went home with her child after the swim lesson to see what had happened. As we now know, what had happened was of nightmare proportions. And the father faced his own devastation when met off the plane by police and informed that his children had been murdered.
The destruction of a happy family is beyond imagination.
But what struck me hard, aside from the murders, was the crushing criticism the mother has faced in the media by readers of the story -- people like you and me.
What did the Mom expect - leaving her kids with a stranger?
This is what happens when you underpay illegals who care for your kids.
Mothers who don't work and tool around Manhattan at their leisure, leaving their kids in the care of a lunatic can only expect something like this to happen.
If Mom cared, she would have been home with her kids instead of abandoning them to the cheaply-paid help.
These opinions were garnered from the true story of a mother who has a husband who travels. A mother who was with one of her children at swim class and who was to meet up later with a woman she knew well, who was taking care of the other two at the time.
How can people come up with such a bitter, untrue, finger-pointing scenario when every single report was re-telling the story of a mom of three who simply needed a little help while she cared for her own kids all day?
And what made so many people feel this way?
Maybe it's because this family is white, fairly well-off and living in a nice building in Manhattan. Dad is an executive for a well-known organization and Mom cares for the kids in her nice New York apartment -- one that has a manned front desk.
So in the comment sections, the mother gets labeled as a rich woman who dumps her kids on badly-paid undocumented help that she hardly knows and takes off. Maybe Mom was off shopping for purses and drinking afternoon martinis with her rich friends (and so what if she was?) while an obviously psychotic stranger is murdering her children at home.
In reality, the nanny is a naturalized American citizen. And the entire family had stayed with the nanny's family during a recent visit to the Dominican Republic and spoke glowingly of them in the family blog.
The entire barrage of vicious commentary again the mother (not the father) is a sign that mothers (and women) can still never live their lives without such cold criticism.
Criticism from those who expect her to care for a home where nothing ever goes wrong, where her husband is always kept happy, where she also brings in an income, has genius children, and is doing it all in a size 4 dress with a happy, wrinkle-free face.
The notion that a mother might need some help seems unheard of. Perhaps if Mom had been a working mom the criticism would be even worse. Woman chooses money and career over the lives of her children, commentators would scream.
Perhaps if Mom had done the killing, it's worse again, because Mom should have asked for help. Ironically -- maybe a part-time nanny, so Mom could get everything done in a day without falling apart.
As women, when we pat ourselves on the back as to how far we've made it, it takes one horrific incident like this for us to realize how little we are known and respected, and how impossibly grand the expectations are for us.
We should have known! We should have stayed home, gone out, come back earlier, come back later or never leave our children at all -- not even to take one to a swim lesson.
Because when we don't know that a close, trusted employee could do the unthinkable, we have failed in every aspect of our lives. There are no excuses, no reasons, no possible way that we couldn't -- shouldn't -- have known.
And it all comes down to the fact that we, as women, must be all things, at all times, to all people. Otherwise we are monsters , who somehow knowingly contribute to the murders of our own children.
At least this is according to the non-stop comments from people like you and me, who would never leave their children for a second. Who would never have a babysitter so we can care for one child for a couple of hours, while the others remain at home.
I can only hope that as people, we stop thinking like this. That we stop racing to blame women and mothers for the evil deeds of others.
The parents of these murdered children probably want to die themselves and are facing grief like we will never know.
They will stay on this earth, of course, and fight like hell through the minute-by-minute agony they face, because they have a child left. A child who will grow up knowing her sister and brother were brutally killed and that nothing but luck -- or fate -- kept her alive.
This family -- what is left of it -- must be embraced, brought back to life somehow, and encouraged to live on. The notion of blaming an innocent mother is outrageous.
Women will never be truly valued when they are expected to be superhuman. We are all simply human.
And this human woman who came home to find her life shattered, must not be made to face the anger and hate of strangers who are filled with the bile they spit out behind an anonymous computer screen.
There is only one person to blame and some day she may provide answers to the parents and be held accountable for the death of two beautiful, innocent children and the legacy she left behind to the third.
Where so many people lost their humanity and compassion I cannot say, but I can only hope they never have to walk the path of the three family members left behind. And if they do, may they never have to face the bitterness and hate of others just like them.
More can be read on this CNN report and in the comment section here: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/26/us/new-york-nanny-deaths/index.html?hpt=hp...
Reviewed October 30, 2012
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith