How to make sense of it

I look at my 3-year-old daughter, just a year from being pre-school aged, a scant two years younger than some of the victims of today's atrocities, and I lose all ability to reason. If a child, just moments in time older than my precious wildflower, can be gunned down in a small, secluded, affluent, safe, elementary school, then where in the world are children safe?

I can't stop reading about the tragedy in Newtown, CT. I'm sitting at work trying to make leads, but totally not caring because how does this job matter in the face of this horrible act of extreme and senseless violence?

I want to save all those lost babies. Pluck their souls and futures back from the dark and heal their broken bodies, reunite them with their grieving families and erase this horror from history. I want to hug them all and wipe away tears and wash the blood from their faces and make everything better. I want to save the shooter from his own broken mind long before he decided picking up a gun was the right answer to a question only he could hear. I want the doors to have been too heavy for him to push through. The car to have not started and brought him to that place. I want so very much for it to have not happened. But I have no power over the universe to make that wish so.

I don't know how to move past this in the part of my motherness that allows a child to grow up and away. I don't know how to let her move from my grasp and my eye. I want to hold her close, keep her to my breast, envelop her in my sphere of control, forever.

This is not rational. This is not healthy. This is not how to mother. But this is what my instinct is screaming at me to do. I know that tomorrow she will grow a little further from me, next year even more, and always away. The line between us will never be severed, but she will draw her own lines and all I can do is pray and beseech the universe to please keep her safe, to teach her how to be safe, and to accept that I have no control.

We are all going to spend the next days and maybe weeks trying to understand why this happened and how it could have been prevented. Gun enthusiasts will demand the gun control will only make it worse and politicians will do nothing in the face of the lobbying behemouth of the NRA. I don't have the answers but I do know one thing, something must change. Too many of our most vulnerable have been lost to these kinds of mass killings, this is a symptom of something broken in our society and we must, must, work together to heal that break. Better mental health services and outreach programs. More accesible interventions. Yes more gun control. Less glorification of violence as an answer. Less use of violent rhetoric by our politicians and pundits which makes violence seem normal and appropriate as a response to frustrations or disappointment. We need to abhor violence, reject it, find alternatives.

We must work together, only in harmony and cooperation, can we heal.

V, the wildflower child, in front of her artwork