When news of the recent Cincinnati Zoo incident made waves across the internet, many parents wrote essays about the hot-button issue. One mom decided to channel her thoughts about the news and public response into a powerful cartoon.
Sage Stossel created a cartoon essay called "Welcome to the Bad Mommy Zoo," which was published on The Boston Globe website. See a sample of the cartoon below:
Stossel told The Huffington Post that she was struck by the public's response to the tragic incident. "So many people's first instinct was to criticize and make assumptions about the mother, instead of more empathetically recognizing that it could happen to anyone," she said.
"Just before I heard about the zoo incident, a friend had been telling me about the nightmare of briefly losing her son at a carnival when she turned to fish something out of her bag for her older child," she added. "And my own first thought on hearing the Cincinnati news was that it totally sounded like something my 2-year-old might do."
Observing the extreme criticism the Cincinnati Zoo mom received, Stossel came up with the idea of a zoo where people "gawk at" and condemn different kinds of moms.
"My point isn't that these are in fact bad mothers but that pretty much any kind of mother, raising her kids in just about any way, can be -- and probably has been or will be at some point! -- accused of being a bad mother," the cartoonist told HuffPost."And I should note that more than a few of the Bad Mommy categories in the cartoon apply to me ..."
To see the full cartoon, visit The Boston Globe.
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