Judgy McJudgerson

Peo­ple can we all just get along? Stop being so judge­men­tal and nasty?  I’ve been read­ing a lot of hor­ri­ble things being said about the par­ents of those that died in Aurora. I’ve also been read­ing non-Americans weigh­ing in on how stu­pid we are. How we’ll ban cheese before auto­matic weapons. The self right­eous com­ments after that hor­ri­ble story of the lit­tle boy who was killed after falling off a trac­tion engine.

When did we become so intol­er­ant? We’re not allowed to make mis­takes, if your kid runs off into a busy road you’ll go to jail because you SHOULD HAVE KNOWN HE’D DO THAT. You should have tied him to the car/yourself/wrapped him in bub­ble wrap. We are so wor­ried about bad things hap­pen­ing we are going to for­get to live.  If I was a fan of a film and my 6 yr old was too I would have been at the mid­night screen­ing. It would have been a great adven­ture. Some­thing we’d be excited about as the day drew closer. Get­ting a nap in so we wouldn’t be too tired. I can see Squidge bounc­ing with excite­ment over the mid­night show­ing of High School Musi­cal 526.  How were these peo­ple sup­posed to know some crazy per­son would be there w/ guns blaz­ing. I’m not going to debate gun con­trol. I know I don’t like guns. I don’t need a gun. I believe the police or army are much bet­ter suited to pro­tect­ing– it’s their job. It’s what they’ve been trained to do.  Are peo­ple focus­ing on blam­ing the par­ents because it’s eas­ier than try­ing to deal w/ the thorny issue of our god given right to bare arms. I don’t know.

I guess I just wish peo­ple would keep their opin­ions to them­selves. Rich com­ing from some­one who blogs, uses Twit­ter and Face­book. Maybe social media is part of the prob­lem. We’re so used to spew­ing our opin­ions all over the inter­webs we’ve lost any sense that we need to fil­ter what we say. You may think you’d never take a six year old out to mid­night film. You didn’t. Another mum did. It was her choice and we need to under­stand that we all par­ent dif­fer­ently.  This is an old debate as I remem­ber the hor­ri­ble things peo­ple said to/about Made­line McCann’s par­ents because they left their sleep­ing kids in the hol­i­day apart­ment alone. Would I have done that? I don’t know. I’ve left Squidge sleep­ing in a hotel room and I’ve gone to din­ner 2 floors down, not exactly the same but sim­i­lar.   Shall we all meet in the vil­lage green so you can all stone me to death? How about I give you my address so you can call social ser­vices on me? I par­ent dif­fer­ently than you. I might not agree with how you par­ent your kids but that doesn’t mean I can or should pub­licly out you as a hor­ri­ble par­ent. Some­times bad shit hap­pens. There isn’t any­thing we can do about it. I remem­ber when I was 7 years old the sis­ter of a friend of mine died. We were walk­ing home from school (alone, our par­ents worked and for the most part we were latchkey kids or com­mu­nally watched by some­ones granny or aun­tie) when we came to our friends house sur­rounded by police and ambu­lances.  We rushed in to see the lit­tle sis­ter of my friend Danny dead.  She had been play­ing with a bal­loon and it had popped. She swal­lowed a bit of the bro­ken latex and had suf­fo­cated. So shall we ban bal­loons? I mean they’re death­traps. A kid died once. Yes, it was a hor­ri­ble biz­zarre tragedy.  My point being we can’t take into account every­thing that can kill us because every­thing can kill us.

Since I’m bar­ing my soul here let me go on and pub­licly admit that I have been known to eat a Kit Kat or three. I make cof­fee every morn­ing and am cur­rently nurs­ing a cup of Nescafe.  Good thing I don’t have a lot of read­ers or I’d prob­a­bly lose a few with that con­fes­sion. Again I go back to the begin­ning… stop being a Judgy McJudger­son. This may come as a shock to some of you but YOU ARE NOT PERFECT and AND some peo­ple do not agree with how you par­ent and that is OK.