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No Words

Words cannot describe the loss.

Like so many others, I sat horrified and watched the coverage from Sandy Hook Elementary. My boys were upstairs, Nicholas napping and Benjamin playing quietly with Legos. I was supposed to be getting ready for our Breakfast with Santa tomorrow morning, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the television. I cried. I prayed. And I wondered: how?

I sat dumbfounded as a correspondent from MSNBC reminded viewers, “this sort of thing doesn’t happen everyday”. How can that even matter? It happened. That’s all that matters. It happened. All those sweet babies. Benjamin’s age.

Everyday I send my boys to school with the expectation that they will be safe. That they will have the opportunity to love, and learn, and grow. I pick the boys up at the end of the morning, excited to hear about their day as they fight each other over who gets to tell me first. Everyday I do the exact same thing that the parents at Sandy Hook did today. But, their children won’t be coming home. Ever again.

How?

It is a parent’s worst nightmare. I cannot even pretend to imagine how the parents of those 20 children are feeling. How the families of the educators lost are feeling. All I know is that my heart is breaking for them.

This country needs to have a serious talk about its collective priorities. Because the lives of our children, their right to love and to learn and to grow – safely, trumps your right to bear arms.

There is so much more that I want to write about this, but just don’t know how. There is nothing that I can write to put this into perspective, to make sense of this, to dull the ache.

Tonight, all I can do is hug my boys a little closer.

One day, when they are older, Benjamin and Nicholas will read this blog. And when they do, I want them to know that though we live in a scary, unpredictable world, Pierre and I will always be their safe place. We will always be there to listen to them, to ask questions with them, to figure it all out with them. To hope with them.  Because, after a day like today, hope is what we have to hang-on to.

For parents looking for suggestions on talking with their children about the events at Sandy Hook, take a look at this link: Talking to Kids About the Newtown School Shooting from Parenting.com.

xo Naomi

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