The family unit is under such tremendous strain nowadays that more and more we see rashes of mothers and fathers killing their children and then killing themselves. The family unit bubble is being stretched so thin that it’s bursting.
Over the past two months I’ve read one too many story of how a mother or father has killed their kids and then done themselves in. It’s hard for me to fathom how a parent could reach such a point that they would resort to murder. Do these people just “snap” or does this evolve over a period of time?
Money is often an issue. Many get distraught at their financial plight and decide to take the whole family out of what he/she perceives as misery. Some parents are suffering from depression or a psychosis and they believe that by killing their children they are ending their suffering also. The other extreme psychosis is that mothers have killed their children because they thought they were demonic.
A few days ago I started thinking about how society has changed from when I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s. I thought about the woman who killed her two children in Roslindale. Striking so close to home, I wondered how many other kegs are close to exploding. People are trying so hard to make ends meet that sometimes they get overextended and run into financial difficulty. If a married couple can barely survive, how can a single parent do it?
Only God knows what was going through the woman’s head that she reached a point of no return. In her mind her only solution was to kill her children and herself. Reading some of the information published in the paper, it seems that this woman was walking a tightrope with no safety net below to catch her. Abused as a child she had a child when she was a teenager. Two years later she had another child and eventually the father left the scene.
The years when she should have been finishing school and enjoying her teens and early twenties, she now had to sacrifice to raise two young children. I wonder how many times she looked at her kids and saw what a burden she was carrying. I wonder how many times she looked at her kids and saw that they too would probably end up in the same situation she had landed in. Did this woman have any family support, such as a brother or sister an aunt or a grandmother; somebody that she could go to in times of stress for some help?
Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say, “Leave the children with me for a few days, and just take a break.”
How is this woman going to live with herself, knowing what she did? My prayers are with her.
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