Abandonment – A few confused thoughts

A viral share in Facebook today made me think of Abandonment. A simple Google search will tell you hundreds of stories of abandoned girl babies or elderly parents. This physical abandoning is bad yes. Very bad. But in my mind, even worse is emotional abandonment.
The state where you simply cease to care about the emotions of someone.
It could be a friend, a family member. Very often, people drift apart. In that scenario, the emotional detachment would be mutual. There is no hurt, perhaps the longing of a bond once shared. What I am talking about is the situation where one puts their emotional need, their own feelings and their own self above the other person. Whatever be the situation, even if it about someone else, your own reaction to it, your own feelings about it take precedence.
Let me give you an example. A child falls face down on the road and knocks a few teeth out. The child’s mouth fills up with blood from the wound. The mother comes running, takes one look at the child and faints at the sight of blood. One could argue that it is the mother’s love that makes it impossible for her to see her child in that condition. Tell me, isn’t that putting your own need above the others. Mothers are supposed to be selfless. Right? Then why is it okay to put the child’s need after her own? One thing is that we expect too much from the mothers. But that’s not the point I am trying to make here. Such instances are the beginning of emotional abandonment. Eventually, in this scenario, how the mother feels becomes the prime thing in the relationship. Her pride if the child does well in exams, her disappointment if he does not. Her worry when the child is away for long, her unhappiness when the child does something wrong in her eyes. She has abandoned her child emotionally because what the child feels does not matter.
As against this relationship, think about another lady. She was picking her daughter from school and crossing the road when a wayward motorist hits her and both she and the child fall on boulders at the side. She picked her baby just before she hit the ground and took all the pain. She comforted the child even as her own back ached. This mother would always put the need of the child above her own.
Maybe the examples I shared in here were a little extreme, but the point is that our society is rife with such examples. When the roles reverse, the chances that the child in the former case would abandon the mother are higher than the latter. Would they be the ones to blame? An emotionally abandoned child, physically abandoning a mother? Society would judge the child right away, casting them as a villain of the highest order. Do we know the back story? In most cases there is a painful back story. Can we be bigger men and women and stop judging others on the basis of sob stories?