I had a conversation with a school-bus driver that broke my heart.
The bus driver, an older mom with grown children, told me that one of the hardest parts of the job is when, at the beginning of each school year, she witnesses the same heartbreaking scene playing out every year:
The yellow school bus reaches one of its scheduled stops in the morning.
A mother takes her 3-year-old or 4-year-old child by the hand and tries to urge him or her up the steps leading up into the bus. This child has never gone to school before, has never gone anywhere without a parent.
The child refuses and shakes his head vehemently, backing away.
The mother insists, climbing into the bus herself, pulling the child in with her.
She finds a seat inside, sitting next to the child, trying to explain that he must leave Mama now and go off to school like big boy. He blinks up at her and starts crying, first quietly then hysterically.
The mother tries to console and comfort the child, promising all sorts of treats and bribes after school, but the child can't think that far ahead yet. The child is still trapped in the right-now nightmare of feeling like, at the ripe age of 3 or 4, he must be forcibly removed from his mother for reasons he cannot comprehend.
Cars form long lines on both sides of the street, because when the school bus makes a stop in suburban neighborhoods, a brightly-blinking Stop sign on the side of the bus instructs all cars to stop and wait. Some people begin honking their car horns, impatient to get to work in the morning, getting late.
"Ma'am, we have to go now," the bus driver is forced to say to the mother holding up the bus holding up traffic.
"I have to go," the mother says to the child, frantically. "You be good now, and go to school."
The child clings even tighter to the mother, crying even louder.
The mother eventually extricates herself from the clinging arms of her frantic child, who is now wailing uncontrollably, watching Mama walk away and off the bus.
The driver told me that these young children keep crying and wailing and calling for their mothers, long after the mother leaves and the bus pulls away from the curb. The children often cry the entire bus route, all the way to the school. These children are so young that they still take afternoon naps, bringing a special bag stuffed with their pillow and blanket with them to nap at school.
The same depressing drama unfolds itself at daycare drop-off times across America, at pre-schools, nurseries, anywhere where babies, toddlers, and young children are institutionalized.
What effect does this traumatic event have on the psyche of the child?
What effect does this separation have on the mother-child bond?
It boggles my mind how many modern mothers needlessly leave their home and children to voluntarily go to work at an outside job (to "find herself" or "fulfill her potential" or "contribute to society" or so she doesn't "have to depend on her husband" or to be "a strong independent woman"), knowing what we know about how much the first ten years of life permanently impact our life and shape our personality and mold our character.
Why? Is whatever you left your child for worth it?
We can trace the way we are as adults to the way we were raised as children. If our mother was absent, if our father was angry, if our parents were preoccupied or neglectful, this will directly mold our thoughts, behaviors, beliefs about ourselves and the world.
To grow up happy, healthy, balanced, and grounded, children NEED present, attentive, loving parents--mother and father both.
But the father, by necessity, must work to financially secure life for the family. This is his role as husband and father.
If the mother doesn't *need* to work out of necessity, why is it ever a good idea for her to leave her home and children daily for 8 or 9 hours for literally ANYTHING ELSE?
How have we normalized this dysfunctional pattern in modern society?
If the mother needs a break from the kids, this is normal, but she doesn't need a full-time corporate job to get a break.
But if she prioritizes a job over children due simply to materialism, individualism, feminism, escapism, hedonism, colonized mentality and western secularism, this is a tragedy.
The child pays the price for the mother's "dreams and goals."
And then the family pays the price.
And then society pays the price.
- Umm Khalid
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