The Dangers of Farmville - If you are a baby

[TL10]

Just to clarify, I was intending that the smoking was infact intended to be an 'add insult to injury' statement. I just type before I think sometimes.

[Gwen]

i see the smoking as very incriminating. it's easier to rationalize (in that we want to assign some blame other than a parent could just be that cruel to their child) what she did by saying it was a fit of rage or some other uncontrolled emotion in which she could not think clearly. but the taking a break, walking away from it, having a smoke (which i've heard calms the nerves, so in theory it should have helped the situation) and then coming back to "finish the job" makes it very hard to not assume some kind of evil premeditation. the child was probably still crying after having just been abused like that thus triggering the second attack. however, i do see the fact that she walked away and stopped for a moment an indication of that clarity where you think "i shouldn't be doing this" or "this isn't right" but she did it again anyway. so i do understand the "what's worse" comment in that it's hard to believe it was a situation where the mother was a second victim here (which i think we have a tendency to want to believe). instead it implies that the mother just didn't love her child, was that cold and calculatedly abusive (which is "worse"). i think sometimes we just don't want to believe such parents exist.

[mordorbund]

The way I read it, the screaming child got her into a fit of rage (I can relate to that) to the point where she starts shaking the baby. Some rational part of her still had enough voice to encourage her to step away from the situation and regroup. [reading between the lines now] She may have been unable to regroup because she could still hear the child screaming like demon spawn. When she returned to the situation, she was not any calmer or more rational than when she left. She was probably in a worse state than when she left.[/reading]