Parents’ Nightmares and Parents as Nightmares

I came upon this TV show while flipping TV channels. It talks about urban legends that are mostly funny but some are scary. One of them disturbed me a lot. I think it’s because when I watched it, and heard the story for the first time, I was pregnant with Matthew and overwhelmed with maternal instincts. I was, at that time, in the peak of preparing myself to become a parent for the first time.

Anyway, the story goes like this:

There was a girl and she was babysitting. The parents had gone out to a party and had left their infant at home with this sixteen-year-old girl. So she was babysitting and they phoned just to see if everything was all right. She said, “Oh. Fine! Everything’s great! The turkey’s in the oven.” The mother went, “Oh, okay. Fine.” and she hung up. Then she looked at her husband and went, “The turkey’s in the oven? We didn’t have a turkey!” He said, “What’s the matter?” So they decided they had better go home and see what was the matter. Maybe there was something wrong with the babysitter.

They excused themselves from the party and went home. So they walked in the house and saw the babysitter sitting in the chair freaking out. She had put the little infant in the oven and had thought it was a turkey.

- Reference: Wasted and Basted, Snopes.com

There are other variation in this story. Sometimes it is incorporated with the babysitter being high on drugs. Knowing that it’s an Urban Legend, it’s suppose to have not happened at all in real life. But it still gives me the chills. It makes me think about real life dangers that could happen to my child. I cringe at the thought of them.

And then, I watch the news. There are so many cases worse and scarier than this urban legend. Little kids or even babies as young as a month old in real life are being killed. Crimes against innocent children are bad enough. What could be worse is that some crimes were committed by the children’s parents. Cases of shaken babies, for instance. Or when babies are left forgotten in the hot car by their own parents deliberately. I have also read about mothers cutting off their babies hands to elicit sympathy from people. So that they will get more when they beg for money and food. And how about those parents who kill their newly born baby because she is not their preferred gender. As a mother, these acts – I just can’t understand. When the parent, who are suppose to be the child’s protector and the ultimate caregiver, becomes a child’s nightmare, it’s disturbingly sad and scary! And if they could do harm to their own children, what’s going to stop them from harming other people’s children? What’s scarier is they could be the next door neighbor, the school nurse or the postman.

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