Your Kids Will Kill You, If You’re Lucky

fears abound in parenting, but why can't we as a society do anything about the real ones?

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Last week in a moment of pique, one of our kids told my husband, “I’m going to suck all the bones out of your body and put them in a car that drives away so you fall down and go dead.” 

If you’ve ever been woken in the night by a child silently standing by your bed, peering through curtains of hair like a coquettish Chuckie doll, you’ll understand what a matricide looks like. 

Let’s face it: were toddlers bestowed more body mass, we’d all be dead.

Agrippina the Younger's son, Nero, tried to kill her four times before he was successful. First, conventional poison (smart lady, she took antidotes). Next, he ordered someone to drop roof tiles on her bed as she slept (dumb and impractical, the guy enlisted to do so gave up quickly). His penultimate attempt included a boat with faulty bottom (she was a strong swimmer and her son had no idea she could swim, another unappreciated mom talent). 

Even in the final attempt in 59CE, word is Agrippina put the sword in herself because the assassins were so embarrassed about the whole thing. 

Which is all to say, we should be careful but not overly so. 

If you’re a stats person, there are 200-300 parricides per year in the US. Not really a concern for most parents. But let’s consider its inverse, at a slant.

At a family reunion, pregnant with my third child (the same one interested in sucking bones out), I listened as a relative, tongue thick with martini, slurred “I always thought three was perfect–if something happens to one, you still have two left.” 

She lied, of course. Having children is pressing on the bruise, ripping out the most vulnerable parts of yourself and handing them to the world like carrion. With each child, more organs you didn’t know you had are extracted, laid pulsing, exposed in more palms you didn’t know you had. Like some Shiva or an octopus waiter. Worst-case scenarios are everywhere.

My aunt found my cousin cold. He’d died of an overdose, sleeping above her, on the third floor in his bedroom. She’d slept through it, his death. A string of words which still feel syntactically impossible to my brain. 

There are those moments when news reaches you and you can’t forget the smell and taste of the room you heard it in. My firstborn was milk-drunk and napping beside me in bed while I scrolled. “Nation Reels”, “Horrors Emerge”, “20 Children Dead”. Among the slain in Sandy Hook, six-year-old Dylan died in the arms of his teacher. And to this day the unshakeable detail for me is that Dylan’s favorite color was purple. I’ve wondered if artwork on the fridge still shows this color preference. I’ve wondered at how awful to open the door to make my other child a sandwich or pour him a cup of milk. How awful to separate the laundry. How awful to see the sun. 

And it felt impossible that nothing would change. 

And things did change. My son turned 10 this year. He’s gone through blue, gold, pink, purple, teal as favorite colors. Sometimes he changes his mind in a month; sometimes he holds on to a favorite for two years. American children are now twice as likely to die by gunfire than they were 10 years ago, when Dylan and 19 others died.

What a privilege to change your favorite color. What a disaster of a country we are. 

While gunfire is the number one cause of death in American children drug overdoses are number three. Both of these national viruses put us at the bottom of the heap in wealthy countries when it comes to child mortality. The worst part is, were we not so hollowly stubborn, there are models we could follow. Other countries have had these issues, dealt with these issues to effect. Our inaction is a child’s death sentence.

Two years after Sandy Hook, my husband, kids, and I packed up for Europe. The luxury of being an international educator is that I can raise my children in a country where they have a 46% better survival rate every day. 

But many children I love live in the US. We spend every summer in the US, visiting battlefields, cruising malls, picking berries, shucking corn. We spend enough time there that in their short lives, summer feels endless. For my six-year-old, two months of summer spent is 3% of his lifetime. And they’ll likely go to college in the States (much to the loss of my savings) and they, my prodigal sons, may choose to return to their homeland for good one day.

I want them to love their home country. And yet, I’m not sure that it loves them.

More than anything, I want them to live. My dream is that they will be thick around the middle, wrinkled, calloused, sad, angry, joyful, tender, around my bedside, maybe deciding amongst themselves whether or not to pull the life support. To say goodbye to old mom, and to live on.