Welcome to my Life

I am a blogger.

I am a twitterer.

I am a mother.

I work outside the home.

I read books.

I talk on the phone.

I cook, clean and do laundry.

I write on occasion too.

My children are not always within my sight.

And I think those qualify me to have an opinion in the tragedy of Bryson Ross.

I didn’t know of Shellie or Bryson until this happened. It feels disrespectful to be using their first names when I never knew them. Yet, any other names would make this so less personal.

I don’t have specific time lines. I don’t have time stamps of tweets sent or phone calls made. In the end none of those would matter, because none of those would bring Bryson back. Bryson drowned in the family pool. What I know is this. They were outside (and by ‘they’ I mean Shellie, Bryson, and his older brother) (again, real names seem so familiar, a familiarity I don’t have. Yet anything else seems cold and formal) and Shellie asked her oldest son to take Bryson inside, she would follow. When she found her oldest inside without Bryson just a few minutes later, they went looking and found him at the bottom of the pool. CPR was administered. EMT’s were called. He was rushed to the hospital. He was pronounced some time later. In the midst of all of this, while she waited anxiously, alone except her son who I’m sure was consumed by guilt, in a waiting room while doctors, nurses, ER staff members worked to save her baby, she sent a tweet to Twitter.

Pray like you’ve never prayed before. My 2yo fell in the pool.

Those 12 words, 62 characters, well below the 140 Twitter limit, are the center of a nationwide controversy. Who knew?

Ok, let’s back up a step. Who among us have not entrusted our younger children to the care of their older siblings? It’s natural. ‘Take your brother and go inside’ has been uttered by mothers across the country across the ages. So there was nothing out of the ordinary for Shellie to ask that of her oldest son. At 2 years old, how many nights had Bryson walked past that very same pool and *not* fallen in? It happened. It was an accident. To say it was an unfortunate accident is really an understatement, but it was just that, an accident.

The EMTs are called and they begin to work on Bryson. Shellie’s husband is in the military and therefore unavailable. She was forced to face this tragedy alone. Falling apart, scared, worried, and yet holding it together, being brave for her oldest son, and clear headed enough to make all necessary decisions. They take him to the hospital, rush him off the ER and continue to try and revive him, leaving Shellie in the waiting room alone and scared. I dare any parent to stand in the face of all of that and worry how 12 words, 62 characters are going to change their life. That had to be the furthest from her mind when she sent that tweet to Twitter.

Now, I am just guessing what it was like for her. I cannot begin to imagine what she was going through in that hospital. But if it was me, and my husband couldn’t be right there and my family couldn’t be there right that minute. I can understand the need to reach out to someone, to anyone, and ask for help, support, prayers, anything to just not feel alone. I can understand the need to tell someone, anyone, just to touch reality.

When I saw Shellie’s Twitter profile, she had 5400 followers. In a matter of 30 seconds, 5400 people were asked to pray like you’ve never prayed before. Even if half of those people retweeted that message, and only had 100 followers each, that’s 27000 more people notified. And so, in a matter of minutes, thousands upon thousands of people knew that Bryson Ross had fallen into his pool. For a person who believes in the power of prayer, that’s support, that’s faith, that’s hope.

There are people out there who truly are just evil vile people who within moments of reading her tweet, replied with things like A good mother wouldn’t be tweeting while her child fell in the pool, or If you weren’t on Twitter you could have been paying attention to him.

I want to say this. I don’t care if that cell phone was in her hand, in her pocket, in her purse, in the house, in her car, or hell in the toilet or left at the park. That cell phone, and by extension, Twitter, did not take Bryson.

All of this has once again brought social networking under fire. But then again, when people don’t understand something, they attack it. I work outside the house. I have to, I’m a single mother. I can understand that for some SAHM’s the social interaction found in blogging and on Twitter, is the most adult interaction they will have for hours a day. Just like I’ve asked people on Twitter for help finding a background image, Shellie asked Twitterers to pray.

On my way to work the other day, they brought up Shellie’s story. (This has been picked up and not only gone viral on line, it’s on national news). Immediately, armed with only half the facts, they started to lay blame on Shellie and Twitter. Even admitting that they weren’t exactly sure how Twitter worked. I did something I had never done before. I picked up my cell phone and called the radio show. I tried to explain what I knew and that is that the tweet was sent from the hospital, and it was sent for support, not for attention.

In the midst of this brewing storm, there is one simple fact that has gotten lost, and that is, a little boy has died and a family grieves.