When I was pregnant I always noticed the cheery pictures painted by ads or articles directed at expectant parents in catalogs and magazines. The first months with a new baby looked like the emotional equivalent of a warm cozy cocoon where dreams of endless possibilities took root, like a long running live version of Goodnight Moon. And the baby years were wonderful.
But I noticed something else: certain news items, ones I would have dismissed with "Oh, how sad" when I was younger, jumped out at me. World problems that I'd studied and debated about in college - hunger, war, epidemics - became much more real. Some stories were almost impossible to read or hear without cringing. All of them featured children in trouble.
The year my now-20 year old son was born was the same year that the local serial killer of children Westley Allan Dodd was convicted. One of his victims was 4 years old. Later that year, four of the five children from a nearby family died in a house fire. Even as I read good-night stories, I remember thinking My God, how do parents stand it? How can you go on after something like that? Why bother with living? I'm sure that bereaved parents ask themselves these exact questions many times.
In my experience one of the most difficult aspects of parenting is knowing that the unthinkable has happened to someone, somewhere, and that there's no guarantee that it couldn't happen to you. We can fool ourselves with illusions of specialness (That kind of thing doesn't happen in our neighborhood. We're more careful. People don't starve in our country.) but deep down, I think most of us know that these are illusions.
Being able to imagine the pain another family is going through or having heightened awareness of the painful experiences of others in general probably isn't something any of us wish for. But for many parents I've met, it comes with the territory. It's not comfortable.
But maybe it's necessary. Discomfort prods us out of our personal cocoons and forces us to work together at finding solutions to problems like childhood diseases, human predators and unsafe houses. We can't bring small victims of tragedies back to life but we can do our best to make sure it doesn't happen again.
For me, the unsettling knowledge that what happens to any child happens to all of us has become simply part of life. It forces me to look outside the it's-all-about-me-and-my-kids box so prevalent now. It reminds me that even though I have an empty nest, there's no shortage of work that needs doing out in the wider world.
In many traditional societies, a woman whose children have grown and left home becomes a wise-woman figure whose knowledge and skill benefit the entire society. In celebration of Mothers Day, maybe those of us who've received gifts in the past could regift or pay forward by making the world a little bit healthier or safer for all our kids.
