You think you had a bad day?
When fear, frustration, anxiety, anger or overwhelming discontent overtake my day I bury my head… in a newspaper.
Seriously; nothing changes my perspective on life faster than reading the headlines of the NY Daily News.
The sheer magnitude of horrific incidents involving parents and their children serve as a serious slap in the face, and makes my personal problems seem like blessings.
You think you’re having a bad day? Take a look at these headlines:
*Mother lets baby boy drown; admits she hated him
*12-year-old girl discovered naked, searching for food in trash cans
*15-year-old girl weighed just 70 lbs, suffered ‘serial’ child torture
*11-year-old girl inhumanely beaten as house servant
Sick.
The first headline refers to Neha Patel.
Police in Tampa, Florida, say she slapped her 1-year-old son, and then purposefully left him alone to drown in a bathtub.
According to reports, when the 32-year-old mom returned 10 minutes later she found her son unconscious, yet she refused to perform CPR, even though she knew the procedure.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, police say Patel told them the reason she murdered her innocent child is that she “hated” him.
Yes, she reportedly despised her baby since the day he was born and blamed him for her “state of mind.”
By the way, after she ended her child’s life, she tried to do the same with her own, but, according to investigators, her plan to jump off the parking garage roof at the Tampa International Airport was thwarted because “every time she attempted to commit suicide someone walked by.”
I’ll let you insert your own one-liner there while I move on to the California mom, who was recently arrested after neighbors spotted her 12-year-old daughter wandering the streets naked and scrounging in the trash for food.
Police say they arrested Tracy Lynn Betts on suspicion of child endangerment after her daughter was seen searching for food in trash cans on the side of a street, completely naked.
The reason the tween didn’t have clothes: Her mother allegedly stripped her daughter of clothes and shoes to prevent her from leaving the vehicle she locked her up in on a daily basis.
According to police, Betts, who works as a teacher’s aide, would habitually lock her daughter in the family’s BMW with tinted windows about a block from the school while she was at work, but not before she forced her daughter to remove all of her clothes and go the entire day without food.
How does your day compare to that insanity?