FWIW, I’m under 35, and I’m still terrified to go into Detroit. OTOH, I’m Canadian, and there is no other city I’ve ever visited that calls to mind the phrase “urban wasteland” quite the way Detroit does. The people responsible are white (by and large, aside from a few outliers), incidentally, since white people set up the Byzantine tax structure that makes it easy and desireable to abandon houses that won’t sell; white people left in droves because of racism and eviscerated the tax base, and white people killed off some of Detroit’s most vibrant neighbourhoods by building highways right through the middle of them. (They also killed off the good public transit system that Detroit had sixty or seventy years ago, and good public transit is nothing if not a great social leveller.)

The reason I said the story squicked me out is because
1. A six year old cannot weigh the benefits and consquences of taking bullets for her mother. Her actions don’t seem heroic when she is too damn young to even understand what she was taking on. I feel like heroism implies a certain amount of self-knowledge, and sacrifice all the more-so.
2. There has to be more to the story along the lines of mythago’s point about how this girl has probably been taking proverbial bullets for Mom for a while.

Or unless you’ve been in the role of helping your mother rather than the other way around for a very long time.

Mythago, you just put your finger on exactly why this story leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It’s pushed certain buttons for me; women I know and love (OK, cards on the table, my mother) grew up with an emotionally abusive mother who neglected her and indeed, everything else. She had to take on a parental role at a very young age. My best friend’s mother was incapacitated with illness from the time my friend was 8–by the time she was 10 she was running the household. From what I’ve read, this is not an uncommon pattern for neglected children. So what I flash on when I hear this story is the pattern of the parentified child, the child who has had to take on adult, protective roles long, long before she should have, the child who’s had her childhood taken away from her. Given the abusive asshole boyfriend, I bet this is not the first time the kid has protected her mother at her own expense. And to me, that’s just not the way the parent-child relationship should work.

Again, I’m not saying that anybody else has to agree. I just spent a lot of time today thinking (and talking to my mother) about why I have such a strong reaction of revulsion to this story.

Or unless you’ve been in the role of helping your mother rather than the other way around for a very long time.

juliagulia, I hope I didn’t come across as Detroit-bashing. I’d probably be living there if it didn’t mean putting up with the rest of the frickin’ state.

And it doesn’t matter if you would do it, or my children would do it for me. I know I would have that measure of love and that’s all that matters.

This sounds very sentimental, I’m sure. Well, it is sentimental, and I’m not going to temper that sentiment with cynicism, or question what that child did for the mother she loves. Good for her that she will go her life knowing she has that strength and that capacity. I wish we all had more of it.

Am I suggesting that all children be ready to take a bullet for their parents? Of course not. But Alexis acted without thought for herself, she showed true heroism, and she deserves to be praised for that.