You may recall the tragedy that happened just about 10 years ago when a toddler got away from his mom at the Cincinnati Zoo and somehow fell into the gorilla enclosure. Fearing the gorilla could harm the child and knowing that tranquilizers do not take effect immediately, the zoo made the difficult decision to kill the gorilla.
And then a good segment of the American population made the simple decision to troll the mom.
A meme went around featuring a photo of the gorilla, Harambe, with the words, “I was killed because a b*tch wasn’t watching her child.” There was also the hashtag: “#GorillaIncident MOM IS TOTALLY AT FAULT SHOOT HER.”
Yes, totally at fault because a 3-year-old, for the first time in recorded history, did not stay by his mother’s side every single second of a visit to the zoo.
Blame is easy and satisfying for so many reasons. It allows us to vent our rage. It allows us to feel better than someone else. It allows us to the false but soothing belief that nothing bad will happen to US because WE are so much better than the person we’re hating on.
When I asked religion scholar Alan Levinovitz about this, he explained that it’s not that we modern folks aren’t religious. It’s that religion used to have a wider influence in our lives. It dictated what we ate and wore and said and sang and how we raised our kids. Today it can still encompass what we believe about God and morals and the afterlife, but it has less influence over all the other things we do. What fills that void?
Experts. Studies. Parenting books. ChatGPT. And without a shared set of protols and beliefs, when something goes wrong we can no longer look at each other and agree, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Or, “Who am I to cast the first stone?”
So instead of uniting in our shared sorrow, we lash out.
The impact on us parents is this: We know that if something terrible should (God forbid) befall our kids, we are likely to get as much blame as sympathy. And that makes it all the more scary to let our kids do anything on their own: We worry they will get hurt and we worry we will get blamed.
So the solution I’ve come up with is this: A pledge we can sign in reality (print it out!) or in our hearts, promising solidarity in sympathy with any parent going through a loss. I call it the:
“THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD” PARENTING PLEDGE
In raising a family, things will go wrong. No parent is perfect. No home is free of pain. The wheel of fortune spins for us all. No matter how hard we try, we cannot control everything. Some kids will get hurt. Some kids will die.
There but for the grace of God go I.
We the undersigned pledge that when we hear of anything from a parenting decision we disagree with to catastrophe that crushes our hearts, we will take a step back. We will refrain from shaming.
Parenting is hard enough. And tragedy takes its own toll.
We hope and pray all will be well with our kids, and all kids. If and when it isn’t, we pledge to repeat to ourselves — or try:
There but for the grace of God go I.
Signed:
Us