When a parent harms a child I find myself feeling horrified, in part because I might identify with the child, but also because I might identify with the parent.
I’m not saying any parent can so easily imagine harming a child. What I’m saying is that any parent struggles to maintain dignity and respect in a relationship with a child. Parenting is intrinsically difficult. What parents try to create in structure, children are perpetually trying to undo, testing boundaries. Because of the nature of parenting, it is sometimes perfectly normal to ask oneself, "Have I gone insane?"
Yesterday’s events in the parking lot of Harvey Industries, on Cottage Street, underline not so much to the difficulties of parenting but the difficulties of managing mental illness.
No mere challenges in day-to-day parenting would cause a father to set his own car afire with his two young children in it, fresh from apparently lying to their mother that he wanted to "spend the day" with the kids, going so far as to drop her off at work himself, kids in tow—at Harvey Industries.
Parents sometimes fight, and maybe kids get dragged into the center of it. In this case it seems like the father really felt the need to make a point. Some suicides are like that—intended to traumatize the loved ones who have to cope with the aftermath.
Did Hipolito Ortiz realize he would traumatize not just the mother of his children—who was admitted to the hospital in her grief—but also the entire surrounding community? And now, in our efforts to come to grips with what he did so publicly, some may agree that Ortiz passed beyond the frontier of any realm where we could possibly identify with him. Is there a lesson in this for the community, or does it begin and end as a horrific act we can never comprehend?
