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Don't
Wait for a Knock |
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by John Tyler Connoley |
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July 6, 2004 |
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My friend
Kelly once had a single mother living next door to her. The woman wasn't a
close friend, more like an acquaintance. But occasionally, this neighbor
would knock on Kelly's door with her infant in arms and plead, "Will you
please watch my baby for ten minutes? If I don't take a break from her, I'm
gonna do her bodily harm." Kelly figured anyone desperate enough to ask
a near-stranger for help was really at the end of her rope, so she always
took the baby, no matter what else she was doing. Kelly told me this story
when I called her in tears the other day, afraid I was going to kill my new
puppy. In the past
week, I've seen into the abyss of puppycide. I haven't jumped in, but I've
teetered on the edge. How odd it feels to find oneself on the verge of
violently shaking a creature that, only hours ago, you thought was the cutest
and sweetest thing on the face of the planet. And strange that such a small,
nearly helpless puppy could make a grown man (and a believer in nonviolence,
no less) nearly helpless against a consuming rage. Later, I watch
the puppy sleep and think, "Did I really want to throw her across the
room?" But, I know I did. Somewhere in my muddled memory, I can still
feel the smoldering ashes of that anger mixed with guilt. Having a puppy
has given me new respect for single and stay-at-home parents. After all, a
puppy is only a puppy for a few months, but human childhood lasts years. I've
been sleep-deprived for about ten weeks; my sister has been sleep-deprived for
close to four years. I spend my days with an energetic puppy in a
three-bedroom house, while somewhere a single mother lives with two toddlers
in a one-bedroom apartment. It only takes
three swift shakes by an adult to kill an infant. Three shakes, and the child
falls into a coma and doesn't wake up. What's surprising is how rarely this
happens, particularly when so many modern American parents are already
stressed out before they ever have children. In a society that offers little
in the way of support to working parents, it's amazing we aren't in the midst
of a shaken-baby epidemic. There was a
time when children were born into a network of grandparents, and other family
members, who lived with the parents and helped them cope with the
difficulties a new child provided. When a mother needed to hand her baby off
to someone so she could take a breather, she didn't have to turn to a
stranger across the street, because she had relatives living with her who
could pick up the slack. Now, even if a family has the resources to let one
of the parents stay home full-time, that parent is left alone with the
children, with little outside support. And, in single-parent or double-income
households, the adults spend their evenings exhausted from work, trying to
get the kids bathed and put to bed, so they can have a few precious minutes
to unwind before going to bed themselves and getting up the next day to do it
all over again. In my
exhaustion, when I was yelling at my puppy the other day -- so loudly that my
neighbors could hear -- I worried what the woman next door must think. I
remembered a neighbor I had in an apartment in Indianapolis who was always
yelling at her children. I looked down my nose at that woman for not having
more self-control, and for being such a bad parent. Now, I wonder what I
could have done to help. Most people love their children dearly, and want to
be the best parents possible; it's just the exhaustion and loneliness that
drives them to be what some of my friends condescendingly call "Wal-Mart
moms" -- those people who shout at their children in public places. In her book Operating
Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Anne Lamott, a single mother, describes
her reaction to her newborn son's severe bout with colic. Her son had been crying
for what seemed like years when Anne suddenly decided one night that she
should leave him on the front porch overnight. If he survived the elements,
then she would assume it was survival of the fittest and she would keep him.
Of course, Anne didn't do this. But for a few minutes -- in her exhausted and
sleep-deprived state -- it seemed like the most sensible thing in the world.
Anne Lamott says she wrote her book so other new parents wouldn't feel like
failures and freaks when they had similar thoughts and experiences. Anne Lamott's
book makes a great baby shower gift. But an even greater gift to new parents
is the gift of temporary sanity. Don't wait for your friends to knock on your
door with a baby in their arms, because many of them won't. Instead, when a
friend has a new baby, call her. See if you can't come over and watch the
baby for a while. A few minutes alone is sometimes the thing parents most
desire and the one thing they aren't sure how to ask for. |
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Copyright © 2004
by John Tyler Connoley
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All
Rights Reserved |