On the Front Line

I don’t like the use of the Momma Grizzly analogy by Sarah Palin. It really has nothing to do with my political stance—I don’t even see her as a real player in the political ring any longer; she’s no longer in public service. No, it’s not about her politics. I don’t like her political use of the mother as a last line of defense because I do, in fact, see many mothers everywhere as being on the front line, fighting the good fight, protective of their children and their families and making sure that they divert the bad and instill the good as much as humanly possible.

That goes for dads, too, but Palin didn’t use a Daddy Grizzly metaphor, so this post isn’t about that.

There are other reasons for my animosity, and it is only fair to share my bias. This week has been a crazy week filled with lots of work, extremely hot temperatures, school preparations, a car not acting right, and a VERY sick puppy. More on that later.

So, let’s just say I’m not in the best of moods right now.

Also, I never saw myself as a grizzly. I have always seen myself as a lioness. I love cats, I’m a Leo—who knows why, but I always saw myself on the Serengeti, keeping one eye on the horizon as my cubs slept through the midday heat in the shade of a lone tree in the grasslands.

Semantics.

I have never been to war, so I don’t really feel as if I could ever adequately explain what it must feel like on the front lines. I have an understanding, an idea of how it must feel. The tedium and boredom of some instances, the routine and monotony of others. The sheer terror of a few moments, the righteous anger of the warrior rarely.

In other words, I think that most mothers see the monotony of laundry and diapers and school drop off lines every day, are occasionally confronted with the terror of a sick or injured child, and only sometimes realize that they are in an arms race to raise their children to the best of their ability, despite the fact that there are others who would enjoy seeing them fail.

I am not talking of other mothers, or judgmental professionals. I am talking about those who wish to do children harm.

I do not usually buy into the fear that you can often see on the news. I stopped watching the news in St. Louis because I could not handle the deaths reported every evening. Yes, bad things happen, yes senseless accidents happen, yes there are a few bad people out there—it doesn’t not have to be all fear and doom. In all actuality, the likelihood of something bad happening to my children, in this country, is relatively low.

Clean water, food to eat. No internal civil strife. Serial criminals are less than one-tenth of the population.

And yet, I have this woman’s intuition (I am a BIG believer of this); what J calls the ‘mother’s gut feeling’.

When I first saw Michael Lester Baust last November, alarm bells rang in my head. My entire lower abdomen clenched in a way I had never experienced before. I know, it sounds trite, it sounds like 20/20 hindsight. I swear to you, though, it was there and I was highly aware of it then. J can back me up on this!

I don’t mind using his name in this post, because it already is in the newspapers. I don’t mind telling you that I think he is guilty, because I trust the investigators who are bringing him to justice.

When J first started working at his current job, he almost immediately struck up a good case of animosity with Mike Baust. This says a lot, because it takes quite a bit for my husband to feel any ill will towards anyone. He would come home and tell me things that I won’t repeat here (mainly because they are not important), and we both came to the same conclusion, rapidly: we had seen this behavior before, intimately. We knew his trajectory. He was cruel, predatory, controlling, and spinning out of control.

I refused to take my children anywhere around him—not inside the store where my husband worked, no car rides home offered (a big thing where my husband works—ride sharing for those working the same shift) no chance of him ever seeing more than a glimpse of my children, if that.

I couldn’t justify it, if it were just based on his erratic behavior and emotional outbursts. This is not appropriate for children, I know, but it just wasn’t enough to explain that horrible gut clenching feeling I would have every time I saw the man.

And then, the good news—he was moving on. Going to work at another place—two weeks’ notice. By this time, the animosity between he and my husband was so significant that when I found out his place of work was closer (much closer) to our house (where he had never been) I ‘irrationally’ thought he was stalking us.

And after, an anticlimactic adieu, and relative peace. Until that gut clenching feeling came back last weekend.

You see, last weekend, Michael Lester Baust was arrested and extradited to Stone County on two charges of sexual misconduct with a minor under the age of 14. He is being held on $50,000 bond—cash only. Thank goodness it wasn’t a child—it was an undercover detective posing as a 12 year old girl online from our state’s internet crimes task force.

I like to imagine a strong, steely, burly 40-something detective sitting in a darkened case room staring into a computer screen and typing things like OMG and LOL.

I pray (and I don’t use that word lightly) that there are no children out there who knew him as a monster.

This is when I realized what my body had already known—the enemy had been right there. My intuition knew that it was time to go into warrior mode; my body physically responded. I am happy with my reaction—my mother-heart was attuned, my body was ready, my mind was active, but not over-reacting. I had listened to my response, and acted accordingly. It was not out of bounds or over reaching, but I had stood there, solidly, between that man and my sons.

So, when Palin talks about the Momma Grizzly, I bristle. It is not something to be taken lightly! It is something to be honored and revered, to be respected and—within each individual—balanced with more temperate emotions.