The story, or versions of it, is sounding far too familiar.
In Brooklyn last week, 26-year-old Dalisha Adams reportedly left her toddlers, who are 3 and 4, alone in the middle of a Canarsie housing project. They were each wearing parkas and Ugg boots, and each had a fistful of diapers.
In Denver a few days earlier, Sarah Hatfield is accused of leaving her two sons, ages 4 and 2, in a car at a filling station and just walking away.
In Portsmouth NH last month, Miranda Rifenburgh, 25, allegedly left her three children -- all under the age of two -- at home alone and never returned.
And in Indianapolis in December, a mother is said to have hired a babysitter for her 13-month-old on Craigslist, then disappeared and left her baby with the near stranger.
The reaction to these recurring tales of maternal abandonment is becoming numbingly familiar as well. "Hopefully these kids will be taken away from this woman and they'll end up with caring people, because this woman clearly has not understanding of what a caring parent is," was one comment left about Hatfield on a local newspaper website. In response to the Rifenburgh story, another reader wrote: "I hope she rots in jail. Mandatory sterilization should be a possible sentence for people like this."
And when the Daily News polled its readers about whether Adams deserves "to get her daughters back," 14 percent said "I'm not sure," 15 percent said "Yes, we don't know all the circumstances surrounding why her daughters were abandoned," and 71 percent decreed "No, any parent who can leave their kids all alone on the street should never have custody again."
You get the idea.
But as "mundane" as this type of tale threatens to become, and as predictable as the outrage that follows can be, you will probably still not be surprised to learn that in each of these stories, things were not as they first seemed. While the particulars were different, one thread was the same: each of these women, who were quickly labeled "bad mothers," turned out instead to be reminders of the burdens and obstacles that so many mothers -- particularly those who are young and poor -- are likely to face while trying to do the best they can. (And as an aside, in more than a few of these tales, where we castigated a mother for leaving, the father of the children was already gone, without headlines...)
Dalisha Adams eventually turned herself into the police, after a friend reached her and said she was the subject of a manhunt. Until then, she says, she was at a friend's apartment because she "needed a break" from what appears to be the frustration and exhaustion of single parenting. But, she says, she did not abandon her daughters. She told police that she dropped the girls off at their paternal grandmother's in the housing project, but did not actually go into the apartment because she feared her ex-boyfriend might be there. She has an order of protection against the father of her children, who has been arrested three times for violent acts over the past five years, though all the charges were dropped.
Sarah Hatfield, in turn, surfaced twelve hours after she disappeared -- hysterically calling her husband from a pay phone outside a hospital saying she had no memory of how she'd gotten where she was. That phone was 11 miles from where she'd left her boys and her minivan. Was she abducted? She did not know. Was she suffering from epilepsy? Depression? Post-partum psychosis? A brain injury or tumor? Doctors are still trying to figure that out.
Miranda Rifenburgh turned herself in to police in Massachusetts. She is said to have told police that the children were never actually at home alone, meaning she may have waited by a back door until her fiancee came in, then left unseen. It has been a grueling month for the young mother. Her 22-month-old daughter, one of two sets of twins, died a few days after Christmas. Could Rifenburgh have been acting out of grief? Possibly. Or maybe not. Perhaps she did callously abandon three children, one nearly two, the others six-months-old. That is certainly the tidier solution, allowing us to believe that WE would never do something like that, and that society has no responsibility to help a woman who might be losing her mind to sadness.
As for the woman who left her son in the care of a babysitter she found on Craigslist, that one is still a mystery. But there are hints of a desperate life in the fact that the mother apparently worked as a stripper, and did not have the money to pay the sitter she had hired. Was she a bad mother? Odds are she will not be winning any Mom Of The Year Awards anytime soon. But she did find someone to care for her son, which, with a turn of the lens, can look like a piercing cry for help.
Who out there is listening?
Sheri Noga, MA
www.grateful-child.com
Why aren't grandmothers teaching their granddaughters the issues with parenting? Why is cultural knowledge dead here? We don't need a bureaucracy teaching values. People are not getting education/jobs because of these mistakes.
Until young women learn the politics of procreation, they're screwed. Unfortunately, an irresponsible pregnancy affects the female more than the deadbeat male. But, it starts before pregnancy. Why are women picking deadbeats to have sex with? Unprotected sex at that. Why is sex so important during a phase in life where studying/growing/learning has to be the goal.
Getting pregnant too early is a recipe for structural poverty. There's almost nothing the rest of society can do to help. There is no one listening. If you get pregnant as a poor teen, you will soon feel alone, poor, not helped, limited, drowning, etc.
It makes me wonder how we can reach out to our neighbors and friends to provide stronger community support, and help connect these women's to resources for help.
Thanks for the thought-provoking article Lisa!
Some of us readers are parents (adoptive parents) of abandoned children. Some of our children are from countries in which infanticide, especially female infanticide, is widely practiced. We give a lot of thought to the circumstances that might have caused the birth parents to place these children at the side of the road: one-child policy with sanctions for those who violate it, serious medical conditions that the birth parents can't possibly afford to treat, a social order than ostracizes or stones a young woman who gives birth out of wedlock. We're just happy that the birth mothers did not choose infanticide or abortion.
Across the board it is tragic for the children as well as the women. It is not too difficult to understand how these women become over burdened, desperate, and clearly they and others simply loose it and walk away. With a sex centered society/culture and an education system that is too heavily influenced by religious concerns/entities, teenagers continue to receive poor sex/reproductive education in the class room. Seeing the casualness and obsessive attitudes towards sex within certain sections of HP reflects this as well. Poor and uneducated parents tend to raise children who do not get the attention and education they need, deserve, and the cycle continues. It will continue unless sex ed/reproductive education is given the attention and support it deserves in school and as long as sex is treated as a casual sporting activity/event.
I absolutely agree how casually sex is treated is a major problem. That is a much tougher societal problem to address and requires all of us, whether we're parents of girls or not, to change our behavior. One only has to look at the many of the Super Bowl commercials to see how sex sells. We have to vote with our dollars so that it won't.
In the grand scheme of things, condoms are not only cheap but free in many places.
Although education on the subject would help, it goes back to parents, family, and parents not being parents. I also believe that many young mothers want to get pregnant. It is difficult to understand the mentality or rationale but it seems so. I see young women with multiple children, can see they are poor, and honestly can not understand why these women do this to themselves.
One can blame men as well and although they share in the process but when it comes down to it, these women are the ones who participated and allowed themselves to become pregnant. How they become pregnant again and again and again is even the much more difficult to believe.
The sad fact is, these people will always be apart of society. It is a sad situation but expect change.
To get through every day with 2 kids under 5!