What do I know about suffering?
I don’t. And what I read in the papers today reported by Cara Wong shows my ignorance, and more relevantly, the pain others go through just to make ends meet or stay sane.
Cara’s report is entitled “Toddler hit by mum suffers cerebral palsy.”
A mother, only 27, pleaded guilty to three charges of child abuse. She will be sentenced at a later date.
The victim is her middle child, only 23 months old. Her other two boys are young, one is 4 and the other is only one month. The children’s father do not live with them.
The mother had anger issues and the incident happened on March 25 last year. If you have the heart for it, here is what happened.
She was bathing her two boys at that time when she noticed that the middle child was “digging into his diaper and playing with his faeces.”
“This angered her as she wanted to end bath time, and she slapped him hard once on the right cheek. But the boy did not stop and the woman slapped him hard once more on the other cheek.”
This was the unintentional fatal slap so great “that the victim’s body turned midway and the victim fell sideways, with his head hitting hard against one of the legs of a nearby metal table.”
“The boy cried and his body started to shake violently as his mother tried to calm him down. She massaged him with some oil, but he became barely responsive and was semi-conscious.”
At this time, the mother panicked and called a friend for help. She was afraid that her kids will be taken from her by the authorities. Her friend urged her to call the ambulance and it came within 15 mins.
But it was too late. “The boy was found to have cerebral palsy as a result of his severe head injuries, and his developmental age was that of a six-month-old child.”
The boy had undergone surgery and that has left him “unable to be fed orally” and was also “assessed to be likely dependent for all his daily needs from then on.”
The mother’s past records showed that this was not the first time she had physically handled him.
“(She) had previously punched him more than five times in the chest when he did not listen to her instructions. In another incident, she fractured his arm by yanking it forcefully when he refused to go to the toilet for a bath.”
Lesson?...
How do you ever recover from this? What can you do to turn back time and freeze that moment just before you release that forceful blow on your son ? How you wish you could undo all that. How you wish you could say sorry.
Alas, the hand that injures will be the same hand that cares for life.
That one irredeemable moment had sadly turned into a lifetime of pain and regrets only the one going through it will experience. The boy didn’t even know what he had done wrong and his mom will have to live with that.
Truly, who would have thought that two lives so intertwined could change so much from an event as unsuspecting as when one is at home bathing her kids?
And I understand that justice would have to be done for all cases. But in this case, I lament with this, “For whom is justice to be done?”
I mean, what punishment could sufficiently serve its sentencing aim for the one who had caused this when the one who had caused this is herself also a victim of the circumstances she had little or no control over.
She was alone. She was bathing her kids. Her husband, the children’s father, did not live with them. He was of no help. She saw her son playing with his faeces. He didn’t stop. He’s playful. She’s angry. She lost it. The blow came. It came twice. She just wanted him to stop. He’s naughty. The metal table was nearby. It happens to be there.
That unintentional slap determines the boy’s trajectory. Anger makes no measurement of one’s strength released. It is blind, but a mother’s love is not. A mother’s love can spot her child even in the masses of strangers. A mother’s love will fight to not allow the authorities to take her children away from her. Yet, it’s human love, and at times, it succumbs to human failings.
At this point, in case you are wondering...no, I am not making excuses for our actions. But I earnestly lament over the circumstances some of us are forced to accept, and over other circumstances most of us sadly take for granted.
Indeed, there are diligently reaped blessings even in the worst of our circumstances, and there are unwittingly heaped curses in the best of them.
But let’s not detract from the case, and this morning, my lamentation takes me beyond the human concept of justice to its unwieldy application in the lives of people whose cry for understanding and help often falls on deaf ears because most of us are busy with making a living and seldom living it out with a purpose that goes beyond our own material aspirations.
Alas, even the noblest of intentions in this postmodern affluent world is often nothing more than focusing our effort on serving an altruistic objective that has progressively become so narrowly defined within one’s legalistically shaped institutional framework that the best of intentions is often lost in the bubbling swamp of our dark human desires we rather not make public.
Again, I have derailed. I have allowed my lamentation to get the best of me. I apologise for that.
But I make no apologies for what we have become through our babelian efforts to solve our own human-created problems, and one of them is our jurisprudential understanding of what a mother in this case deserves for her unthinking actions in the circumstances she will have to struggle to accept and surmount. It is no less a herculean feat for her.
And as a father, my heart goes out to the boy who will never know what normal means because of one misguided and intemperate act that has deprived him of a growth and maturity he was born to enjoy and hone as his own.
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