I’ve been there. I’ve been judged. I understand the anger of @Miltary_Mom when people started to judge her when she tweeted on the drowning of her two-year old son Bryson Ross in the swimming pool of their home in Merritt Island, Fla.
Shellie Ross otherwise known as @Miltary_Mom and who blogs at blog4mom.com tweeted the following:
5:22 p.m. – a breezy update about the fog rolling in and spooking the chickens as she worked in her chicken coop.
16 minutes later, , a 911 call was placed from her home saying that Bryson was lying at the bottom of the pool.
6:12 p.m. ““Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.”
5 hours later, she wrote in tweeter ““remembering my million dollar baby” then posted photos of the little boy. (Some of these tweets and photos have since been removed.)
Then violent reactions errupted:
Not long after that, a firestorm erupted on Twitter, with strangers wondering what kind of mother tweets during a crisis. The debate has been going on for days around the Internet, with critics calling Ross callous (and suggesting that if she had been paying as much attention to her child as she had to her Twitter account, her son would not have come to harm) and supporters (many who know her in real life, and others who have never met her) describing her as a caring mother who reached out to her virtual community during a tragedy.
A local paper quoted Madison McGraw saying that ““If she didn’t want questions raised at such a painful time, perhaps she shouldn’t have tweeted immediately after her child died. A child is dead because (of) his mother’s infatuation with Twitter.”
In Madison’s blog, she points out that “Between the hours of 8:37 a.m. and 5:22 p.m (her first and last before son was found drowned in pool) she tweeted 74 times. ”
Social media specialists said criticism of Ross is unfair, noting that she’s simply tech-savvy and using a familiar way to communicate. They added that it’s inappropriate to question her actions at such a horrible time in her life.
How dare these people judge Shellie! Were they there when the accident happened? Is this the right time to make insensitive remarks? Shame on those who yelled out cruel words. Can they even comprehend the depth of Shellie’s grief? When death comes without warning, the shock and disbelief can be overwhelming. Shellie turned to twitter to seek comfort from her community.
My heart goes out to Shellie. While my son was dying at the emergency room, I was too much in shock to talk to anyone but my sister called another sister asking for prayers from other relatives. If posting on Twitter comforted her and made her feel connected and allowed her to ask for prayers for Bryson, then that is her process. She could have been in shock so great that the only way she could balance it was to do what she normally did…twitter. Everyone grieves differently and I would never criticize her for reaching out to her community. There’s no “right or wrong” way to grieve and nobody should judge, especially if they were not there.
“I’ve seen people react [to a death], but they’re screaming their heads off, crying and they don’t know what to do,” she said. “They’re not on Twitter. I’ve never seen that before and I was just shocked.”
Clearly Madison has no idea on the grieving process. The situation is just so surreal. I never screamed or yelled or cried when my son died. It was only days after.
I don’t see the point in punishing her more after this tragic loss. For a parent, there is nothing more devastating than the death of our child. Let her grieve in peace.
If you want to question the death of her child, there is no good in putting blame on the mother. There are lessons learned from the incident but blaming the bereaved mother is not going to help.
When the unthinkable and the unspeakable happens like the death of a child, that is not the time to be judgmental, and especially, not to be mean or nasty about it.
Think: Is this is the appropriate time or place to be chastising anyone? Where is the compassion here?
