A certain necessary grief

I left school yesterday angry, exhausted, and sad. How many school shootings have there been just in 2014? Reports differ, but the obviously correct answer is too goddamn many. And a good part of my anger and exhaustion is lodged firmly in the fact that they are not going to stop anytime soon. We are not doing anything to stop it.

I did small things to keep myself from sinking. I picked up my daughter; we held hands and scampered through the rain to the car. I took her along to my hair appointment where she sat and read, totally absorbed in her book, which the stylist clicked her tongue at the news and I closed my eyes against it, trying to focus on the scent of the shampoo and the heat from the hair dryer. We picked up Isaac and came home. We had planned to meet Matt for dinner and a few errands, but he heard the fatigue in my voice over the phone.

“Do you want to just stay in tonight?” he said. “I can bring home Thai food and we can run errands tomorrow.”

Yes, I did want to stay in. I wanted to put on flannel pajama pants and curl up with the last sixty pages of The Paying Guests and drink wine while the kids watched Clone Wars. I wanted nothing more than to hunker down in my little house in our quiet little neighborhood, the lights from our kitchen and living room windows shining into the rainy dark streets.

I signed on to Facebook and immediately read someone’s sanctimonious comment about how this is just one more reason she’s glad she doesn’t send her kids to public school. I typed a furious paragraph. Deleted it. Typed it again. Deleted it again. Then I just blocked her. Someone who is that self-righteously out of touch, someone who is that devoid of compassion or sensitivity, someone who would use this terrible day in such a tasteless attempt to pat her own back -- well, we don’t really need to be internet friends. And maybe I should have stayed off Facebook altogether; probably that would have been wiser. It’s just that for all the superficial noise that goes along with social media, sometimes I crave that human connection underneath it all. I want to type something I’m thinking, or I want to type something that maybe feels a little bit vulnerable, and I want to know that someone, someone, will read it.

Maybe that’s why we’re all here. Maybe we should all be a little gentler with each other.

I also read a lot of this: Hug your children. Appreciate every moment with them. Tell your loved ones that you love them. We all say that, when terrible things happen, and it’s good advice, if a bit trite. I would like to think I try, truly and earnestly, to do this. It’s one of the reasons I write all the time -- it’s this near-desperation to hold each moment of their babyhoods and toddlerhoods and childhoods. I go back and read pages of the journals I use to write letters to the kids, and I might say to Matt, “Remember when Suzannah insisted on sleeping in her little pink sweater every night when she was not even two?” or “Remember the funny way she used to pronounce elephant?” or “Remember when Isaac used to go and get the boppy and haul it over to me with this big grin on his face when he wanted to nurse, even if I happened to be in the shower?” and his face goes soft, and our hearts just break a bit with love and nostalgia and this sort of grief -- I don’t know what else to call it -- over time passing, over the impossible bridge between then and now. It is a blessing, because watching our children grow is our deepest joy, but there is a certain necessary grief in letting go. I’m not good at it.

And can I also confess something? That sometimes when I should be basking in gratitude, when I should come home and simply sink to the floor with my babies and delight in every aspect of their existence because I am so very aware that tomorrow is promised to none of us -- so aware I could scream with sheer pain for those who have already lost tomorrow -- instead I am short-tempered, I am impatient, I snap at the kids to pick up their toys right this second or nobody is going to get to pick a movie, I tell them that they are just going to have to go ahead and be hungry for five minutes because the dog needs to go out and the dog needs to be fed and the groceries are still in the car and Mommy doesn’t have five arms and can’t I just have one single minute of people not needing things?

I say some of these things out loud, I think the rest, and then I put on a DVD and carry the laundry into the bedroom, where I dump it on the bed and fold it and cry quietly, hoping the crackers and cheese and apple slices and Clone Wars will be enough to keep them from noticing that I am not within an arm’s reach for the moment.

But the moment passes, because it has to. Our evening settles into normalcy. I cannot stay inside my bedroom and cry all night. So I come out and start dinner, and help my son into his Ninja costume, and I read the pages my daughter fills at the dining room table. She has won a couple of little alien toys from her school fundraiser, and she has decided that they are going to have a wedding, and she is busily scrawling ambitious honeymoon plans all over sheets of printer paper in her neat third-grade handwriting -- what they will wear at each destination, what they will do, games they will play. It is essentially three solid pages of creative writing, and tonight I am so delighted with it -- the imaginative spontaneity of it all, the thoughtfulness and the playfulness -- that I grab her in a fierce hug and kiss her face and tell her how amazing she is.

“Mom, you are kissing me a lot this weekend,” Suzannah says, pleased but exasperated. “It’s a bit much.”

What I think, but what I don’t say, is tough shit, Kid. But she has forgiven me, it seems, for my bewildering earlier snappishness.

And what she doesn’t know now but might understand someday is that even though she is eight years old and her brother is nearly five, I still can’t go to sleep at night until I have tip-toed into their rooms one last time. To brush my lips against their cheeks, to smooth their hair away from their foreheads. And, yes, to make sure they’re still breathing, and to pray that morning continues to come.