Everyone Needs to Lay Off the Mom Whose Son Climbed Into the Gorilla Exhibit
When I was a kid, my family and I took a road trip, and my 4-year-old sister got carsick and vomited in the backseat of our van. We were driving through mountains on our way from Southern California to Oregon, and my dad pulled over on the shoulder near a curve in the narrow road so he and my mom could clean up the mess. Even on the extra-wide shoulder, all that stood between our van and the ocean crashing over rocks below was a patch of dirt and a dinky little guardrail.
My mom got my sister out of her seat and took her to the trunk to change. My dad hopped in the back - where I sat quietly reading - and started to scrub the mess. My other sister - the 4-year-old twin who hadn't barfed - was sitting in the middle row just in front of us. Unbeknownst to either of my parents, she unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed silently to the front. She got into the driver's seat and started pretending she was at the wheel of a racecar. Then, she put the van in drive. It only took a few seconds.
The car started rolling toward the side of the road where only that dinky guardrail stood between all of us and the rocks below. My mom screamed, because the toddler she was changing was suddenly rolling away from her, in the trunk of a van, filled with her entire family. My dad took a second to register what was happening before doing a flying leap over the middle row, crawling up between the front seats and somehow managing to pop the emergency brake just as the nose of our van butted up against the metal railing that would've acted as a hood ornament when we fell to our deaths.
Two decades ago, when this happened, it would've been considered a tragic accident. Today, if our van had gone over the edge and killed us all, the internet would've likely torn my mother - whether she survived the hypothetical accident or not - to shreds. "How could she take her eyes off her daughter for even a second?" they'd write. "And on a cliff of all things." Some would probably say my mom deserved to lose her babies, because she was "stupid" and "not paying attention" to all three of her children at once. Others would swear their kids would never do what my sister did, because their kids are always supervised, their kids know the rules, their kids know that cars are not toys.
I can predict how it would all play out, because that kind of horrific internet shaming is exactly what's happening to Michelle Gregg. Gregg was visiting the zoo with her four children when her 3-year-old managed to slip through the exhibit's barrier and fall some 15 feet into a shallow moat. The western lowland gorilla named Harambe seemed to protect the child before appearing to tug on the back of the boy's pants. Then, according to the Cincinnati Fire Department, "the gorilla was violently dragging and throwing the child," which convinced officials to make the distressful call to shoot the endangered animal.
Backlash against the boy's mom has been swift. She and her son's father are being investigated and could be charged. A Change.org petition called for "the Cincinnati Zoo, Hamilton County Child Protection Services, and Cincinnati Police Department to hold the parents responsible." Comedian Ricky Gervais's sentiment that "some gorillas make better parents than people" has become a widely shared meme, and thousands are chiming in to echo a tired refrain: Something like this could never happen to my kids.
Before having kids, I'd see outrageous news stories and tell myself, "It just comes down to discipline. Anyone with half a brain knows you just have to lay down the law and let your children know you're their parent and not their friend. Then, they'll always be safe and never act up."
But, if that were the case, there'd be no such thing as accidents. Kids who know damn well not to play in the street would never get so excited chasing a ball that they run in front of an oncoming SUV. Children who've been lectured a million times on staying where their parents can see them would never go missing in the clothes racks at Target, their moms spinning in frantic circles, hearts racing as they think, I only looked away for a second.
At 3, or 4, or even 5 years old, kids are not entirely logical. My 4-year-old still thinks it's a real possibility that she'll grow up to be a unicorn someday. She regularly tells me she wants her 2-year-old brother to die so she can have some alone time - fully not grasping the finality of death, despite many talks and even the recent loss and burial of a family pet.
The armchair parenting experts on social media seem certain what happened in Cincinnati could've been prevented if only this mom had been paying better attention to her son. As one Twitter user wrote, "Why kill Harambe because of a bad parent who should've been watching her kid?"
The truth is, it's impossible to have eyes and ears on children at all times, and no matter how much hand-holding you're practicing or how many leashes you put on your kid, you simply can't prevent every possible mishap. Kids often test their boundaries, especially at preschool age. As KJ Dell'Antonia put it in the New York Times, "Closed doors and barred gates are like beacons to some kids, just waiting to be breached or climbed."
What happened to this mom in Cincinnati was extreme, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that she was focused on one of the other three children she had with her, that her son slipped away in a split second, that he crawled under the railing before anyone in the crowd could grab him, that he fell not fully comprehending what awaited him or what catastrophes his curiosity might cause - just like my sister climbed to the front seat with ninja-like stealth while my parents were both occupied and threw our van in drive not knowing what awaited us at the bottom of that cliff.
As moms and dads, we're all one brief distraction away from our kids ending up in a terrible situation. It's not our superior parenting that keeps our children out of trouble. Often, it's simply luck, quick thinking once kids already in a bad spot, or even the grace of strangers who act as our eyes when our kids slip from our gaze.
Michelle Gregg almost lost her child this weekend. There are likely a million things she wishes she'd done differently, and she has to live with the guilt and the trauma of knowing not only what her son went through, but also that their harrowing ordeal is the reason an innocent animal lost its life. No matter how much we criticize this mom, we can't go back and change what happened. What we can do is stop pretending that any of us are immune to freak accidents and practice empathy rather than launching a full-scale witch hunt every time tragedy strikes.
While most of us won't ever experience the sheer horror of our child climbing into a zoo enclosure, or watch as our toddler propels a minivan filled with our entire family off a cliff, deep down we have to know that we can't control everything. Bad things happen to good parents every single day, and any one of us could easily be the mom whose worst nightmare goes viral.
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