However horrible it sounds, there are parents who left their toddlers strapped in their car seats and bake at 108 degrees while parked under scorching heat. Forgotten for nine hours, they were all dead when discovered.

I was reading the major newspaper of the city where I live when I came across this feature story of the latest person who forgot his 9-month old baby in the car. The excuse sound like the others: memory lapse. Parents forget due to stress, pressure at work, busy schedule, change of routine. But to reason that as a cause of death of a helpless, defenseless individual? Acceptable or not?

No Motive

The courts have favored on the side of the parents 60 per cent of the time agreeing that the “motive” to kill the child is missing. Of all cases, the parents are very sorry and even when exonerated have to deal with the burden of guilt of being the cause of the tragic death of their children. Perhaps for the full length of their remaining lives.

I don’t want to pass judgment on these people.  After all, they are normal people, like you and me – holds a job and no prior criminal offenses. The only “crime” they commit, albeit no one would call it as such, is forgetting their child in the car. Such a tiny mistake and the outcome has cost a life – and not only of just anyone but of their own child.

What can you forget in your lifetime? A meal in the oven? Your cellular phone? Your mother’s birthday? Your car keys in the ignition? There are many things that you can forget but none that the extent is so high that it claims your child’s life.

Out of Sight Out of Mind

Should the blame go to the manufacturers? In the early 1990s, it was deemed that the air bags are unsafe for babies so car seats should be placed at the back seat. Later on, they passed the law to have the car seats face the rear. This makes the babies and toddlers unseen and beyond the line of vision of busy parents who are beating the time to get to work and hurrying to drop their children to the caregivers.

All those time, the parents knew their children were safe and were with the caregivers. They didn’t realize that their toddlers/babies were strapped, locked in, roasting, and dying in the heat.

Will this happen to me?

I can’t say this would not happen to me. Reading the paper, the writer was writing on the side of the parents and he made it clear that this can happen to any one – even loving, meticulous, perfectly capable parents. There was even an interview with a memory expert who proves that a gap or lapse in one’s memory is normal and can happen to any normal person.

So okay, this can happen to me, too.  I cannot predict the future and I am just one person living in a world with pressures and stresses and I will tend to forget at one time.

But then I thought of the years I have been a mother. Being in the office, doing my job, and constantly thinking of my children, even calling the caregiver how things were doing. No matter how busy I was and things sometimes get so straining at work, my children are always on my mind. I may have pushed them down from my memory so I can concentrate at my task at hand but to forget about them for nine hours – a full length of a day’s work – that would never happen to me.