Grace Essen:
” Can any action which obviously puts the life of another person, even your own child in danger be done with a pure heart?”

Grace Essen.

It is only natural for mothers to devote all their love and affection to their babies particularly right after birth, and then afterwards. Nothing in the world can be compared to this total and devoted affection. There is just something about a mother’s love that is beyond comprehension, even the Bible acknowledged that. Her bonding with her child is almost like a maddening blindness and an addiction which sometimes affects her behaviour, her reactions and sometimes her sense of reasoning much to the utter bewilderment of everyone else.

Sometime in August, Brittany Pilkington, a 23-year old mom of four was charged with three counts of murder and was jailed, according to police in Bellefontaine, Ohio, Unites States of America. This twisted mom clearly had a favourite child, and her three other kids didn’t just stand a chance.

She confessed to killing her three young sons over the past year to make her husband pay more attention to their daughter. She told authorities she placed blankets over the heads of all her boys to suffocate them one after the other. The first killing was in April 2014 for her four-year-old, and again in July 2014 for her three-month-old, and the recent one, another three-month-old in August this year.

Her husband experienced a dad’s worst nightmare twice before; he had arrived home from work on the night shift to find their two sons unresponsive. He frantically tried to revive their -four year old to no avail as his wife meekly told 911 over the phone, “Our son’s not breathing … he’s turning white.”

Brittany had initially told police she believed her children died from a genetic problem, but authorities began to doubt her story with the circumstances surrounding the latest death. The truth behind the serial killings was eventually unravelled after she ‘calmly’ called 911 to report that her 3-month-old had stopped breathing about 3 a.m. one morning, he later died at a hospital.

A neighbour who lives across their home said he was home when the first baby died. He said he consoled the dad, but the mom did not need to be comforted; she was just cold and just stared like nothing happened. Everyone found it quite odd that she had been smiling at her son’s funeral. In her mind, she was protecting her daughter from not being as loved as the boys were by their father – an action motivated by deep love and affection?

While you chew on that, here is a milder one, a story about another twisted mom from Austin, Texas who was caught on tape smearing human faeces on her then-three-year-old daughter’s IV catheter – a line inserted into a patient’s chest or neck that leads to a vein or directly to the heart. It allows for the quick insertion of medication or fluids and monitors cardiovascular health.

The girl was admitted to a children’s medical centre, with a high fever and “a long history of chronic diarrhoea.” Blood tests came back positive for bacteria commonly found in faeces. The hospital officials decided to set up a hidden camera in her room after the girl continued to have setbacks.

The mom later confessed to police she had smeared faeces on the girl’s central venous line five times during her daughter’s six-week hospital stay. She said she put faeces on the catheter while the girl was hospitalized because she wanted to raise her daughter’s fever so doctors would continue an antibiotics treatment they had planned to stop.

She was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to injury to a child. She had faced up to life in prison if convicted of first-degree injury to a child. Instead, she pleaded guilty to second-degree injury to a child. She was said to have cried briefly during hearing but said nothing. Her attorney, in a statesman outside the court said, “Obviously it was a criminal act, and it was wrongheaded, but it was done with a pure heart.” Can any action which obviously puts the life of another person, even your own child in danger be done with a pure heart?

The County prosecutor said, “It doesn’t have any other rationale than any other form of child abuse would have, our goal in this case was to protect the child and to hold her responsible.” The girl and her two other siblings now live with their respective fathers and are said to be doing fine.

I have pondered on what could have made these moms take such hideous actions. I have also tried to imagine what could be going on in their minds as they cool off behind bars. Remorse? Regret? What?

“But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on a face. Sometimes the stories are simple; sometimes they are hard and heart breaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.” – Mitch Albom.

And for every child who unfortunately has been smothered with ‘love and affection ‘by the very one who nurtured him/her to life, N. K. Jemison may have the right words in this quote: “In a child’s eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.”