Tonight, I hold my children a little closer... I am reminded as I look through their eyes at the universe of the innocents stolen today in a tragedy that incurs no explanation. Twenty children swallowed by a gulf of violence and terror. Educators taken while protecting the most precious ones among us - those who have barely tasted life.
Some of us know where monsters lurk. The offender who frequents the neighbors down the lane, I know him by sight and by vehicle. I watch my children with a keener eye than my parents ever did their five children when off to play they go. I was a rural free-range child, climbing trees, tearing through "the woods," caking rocks in clay for the ultimate "clay ball fight." We rode our bikes without helmets, sprinted to the dead-end and back, and searched the recesses of a dilapidated barn for snakes and their skins. As the sun dipped in the sky, we wandered home, the sweet taste of raspberries in our mouths, the smell of honeysuckle in our noses. Dinner, a ring of grime left around the porcelain bathtub, and then bed beneath starried skies. We were children of imagination, living a storied childhood burdened only by our Monday through Friday school uniforms and stiff shoes. The weekends were ours and ours alone.
My children will never know this freedom. I am most found at home within an arms reach of my daughter. Autism has broken my heart, healed it, and broken it again. It's an endless cycle. My son is growing up in a dense world of conflicting emotion - confusion, fear, anxiety that we are desperate to balance with love, understanding, and generosity. He and I have a tradition that echos back to my own childhood. At least once a week and much more often when he is unsteady in our familiar journey, I whisk him away for a treat, as my mother often took me to lunch after preschool. One of our favorite trips is to 7-11. About three months ago, the life of a store employee was stolen in an armed robbery. Three days later, our special date found us in this store. At six, he's far wiser than I was at his age, a condition of his complex life. As we stood in line with our Slurpee's in hand, he read the signs on the doors, windows, and counter - remembrances of the life stolen and a request for donations to help support his family. What happened to him, mom? Why are there flowers on that car, mom?
I looked into my boys eyes and told him this - Sometimes in this world, honey, there are good people and there are people who do bad things. And sometimes the people who do bad things hurt good people. These signs are for a man who was killed when someone did something very bad. It's scary, isn't it? But, it's very important for us to remember that when we do good things, all of the good in the world is much stronger than any of the bad. He nodded. That makes sense to me, mom. And we put a dollar in the donation jar.
Tonight, we have banished the news from our home. I can't bring myself to let my children learn of the monsters who lurk among us, the ones we cannot discern. I don't want them to feel the icy fingers of fear in their hearts, the crushing realization that for all that we do, schools are less than safe. I want to surround them in love and warmth, watch them as their heads fill with dreams under starry skies. I want what every mother wants. And as I drift off to sleep tonight, my thoughts will be with those mothers, fathers, families, who have been shattered by the terror in Connecticut.
I am so deeply sorry.
Greg Olear: Reading Charles Dickens Today
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