CINCINNATI — With flaming non-toxic safety torches in their hands and their pockets stuffed with fun, healthy snacks for their accompanying children, up to 150 perfect mothers have laid siege to the home of the Ohio woman whose toddler tumbled into a gorilla enclosure last weekend. The mob is demanding that the rotten mother come out and humbly submit to their parenting advice — or continue facing the wrath of their moral indignation.
Carla Finnegan, a 34-year-old mother of one, drove all the way from Buffalo, New York to attend the gathering of vigilante mothers, saying that the moment she read an article speculating that negligent parents were to blame for the child’s fall, she knew she had to act.
“In all of my son Cayden’s 22 months, I’ve never once taken my eyes off of him,” she said, gesturing to the drooling boy gnawing on a kiddie leash. “I’m so dedicated to the well-being of my little love pumpkin that I paid an unlicensed Salvadoran doctor to carve an ocular socket in the back of my skull and surgically implant a functioning mechanical eye, along with all the nerves and stuff. It was only $5000. The picture is kind of fuzzy, but it’s great because the eye never closes or sleeps.”
“Cayden,” she barked. “ I see you behind me putting that gross piece of candy from the ground in your mouth. Drop it or I’ll taze you again.”
Isabel Hernandez, a 42-year-old Cincinnati art dealer who gave birth to quadruplets in 2009 after 10 years of fertility treatments, says that she joined the mob out of a powerful desire to know what the hell that terrible excuse for a mother was thinking — if she was thinking at all.
“Personally, I never take my kids out in public unless my team of highly trained nannies comes along,” she said. “They’re all certified in first aid and have degrees in child psychology. I wouldn’t feel safe with anything less, naturally.”
Mob organizer Rachel Matronius, 29, who astonished scientists last year when she grew carbon-fiber–reinforced polymer helicopter rotor blades from her upper back after her daughter Paulette was born, says that perfect mothers everywhere need to continue expressing their outrage on Facebook and in article comment sections.
“My fear is that if we silence ourselves, we will regress to pre-1980s free-range parenting styles,” she said. “Back then, children were nearly always left to their own devices, and you’d often hear about a kid who injured or killed by everyday items like bread rolls and crayons.”
As of Thursday evening, the zoo mom had not appeared before the mob, leading them to speculate that she was feeding her four children sugary drinks or letting them hurt each other’s feelings.