I am a writer by profession, and I’ve blogged about children almost every day of the last six years. But I’m at an absolute loss for words when it comes to what happened in Connecticut on Friday – the details about which I finally read last night, after several days of traveling and being in somewhat of a (self-induced) bubble. I wasn’t going to blog about it at all, actually – I have lots of happy things to share here (Avery is three-and-half today, we just got back from Wisconsin and have tons of photos, etc.), and what can I possibly say that hasn’t already been said by others, anyway?? But it feels weird not to acknowledge it, it feels wrong and unfair to proceed as normal when there are other moms out there burying, not blogging about, their 6-year-olds today. 

Six. Zoe is six now – the same age as most of the victims. I would have, of course, been affected by the news even if I wasn’t a mom – but having a six-year-old of my own, plus another small one, takes the sorrow/rage to a completely different level. When reading about some of the children who died, they sounded so Zoe-like: One girl loved math and her stuffed lamb, another was referred to as the “little CEO of the family” because of how much she liked to plan things. (Boy, does that ever sound familiar.) All of the victims were, as my favorite mom-blogger put it, “little children leading little lives, precious as miniatures.” Just like my own little ones.

I said to Q at one point last night, after reading the increasingly depressing articles, “How did we let this happen?” and more than once I’ve asked myself, “What if this had been Zoe’s class?” And the sad truth is there are no comforting, easy answers to these questions. It was a horrible, random act – and it really could have happened to Zoe, or any other child out there. We can’t protect our kids from every evil and harm, as much as we may want to – and this mind-boggingly awful truth is just one of the many reasons I have no (more) words for what happened.

And so, the only thing I can really do here today is to remind readers, and to resolve to keep reminding myself, how precious life is. And I will continue to thank my lucky stars for the health and safety of my own precious miniatures.

-M

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2012 at 1:51 pm and is filed under 78.Two kids-December 12. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.