How’s It Going Over There in Dreamland?

Is it even possible to count the number of times I’ve read a newspaper story describing how mom’s boyfriend beat the crap out of her child? No. It is not. Here’s today’s bad fairy tale.

Each case is unique but here are the common elements from my point of view. Mom needs to go to work. Her boyfriend doesn’t need to go to work. She needs child care. He is available. He agrees to ‘watch’ the child. Child acts up. Boyfriend puts the child through a wall. Mom comes home. Boyfriend is surprised that the child could die from falling down the stairs or hitting his head on the coffee table while wrestling or banging his head on the floor because his mother was dumb enough to trust her boyfriend with his care.

At the root of this is magical thinking. Mom has two things going on in her head. The first is that she really needs someone to stay with her child because she has got to go to work or there will be no money in the house. Child care is a huge, urgent, and expensive problem for working woman all over the world. And the pitiful thing is the more desperate a woman is for child care, the lower her standards become. So there’s the first little episode of visiting Dreamland. If the boyfriend seems like a nice guy or even if he seems edgy but under control, it’s very tempting for a desperate mom to say, hey, what could happen?

The second stream of magical thinking involves a little house with a white picked fence. In this episode of Dreamland visited, mom is thinking if my boyfriend is willing to watch my child while I work, well, that’s starting to look like a family. Maybe he wants to step up and be the child’s dad, maybe while I’m at work, he’ll teach junior to ride a bike or write his name in big block letters on a piece of paper that will be stuck to the refrigerator with a happy face magnet when I get home. She’s thinking, it’s what I’ve always wanted.

Don’t think for a minute that I’ve decided to blame mom instead of the boyfriend. In this particular case, the little boy died of blunt force trauma to his head with numerous other injuries. The boyfriend claimed the boy slipped in the shower. The legal process will take care of this guy; he’ll go to prison for a long time. But it doesn’t really matter; he won’t suffer nearly as much as mom. He will blame mom for leaving the little boy with him. Mom will blame herself.

How do we separate what we want and what we ache for from what really is? So many moms just want safe child care while they work and a man they can trust with their child. Is that so farfetched? So unrealistic? Was this mom or any of the other moms who came home from work to find their child dead in a crib, bruised and beaten, crazy? No, they just let their dreams take over their judgment and Dreamland turned out to be a wicked, wicked place. I don’t blame. I just feel bad for them. I’ve been there, had some of the same choices. And I just feel really bad.