Six

When I am stressed or have something on my mind, the writer in me comes out and I have to write to feel better.  I wrote this about six days after the Newtown shooting.  I thought I’d share it here in all it’s unedited glory because it’s too depressing to pour over and edit…but I want to share anyway.

Up until last Friday, what I feared most for my first grader is that he would be exposed to peanuts at school. After the elementary school shootings in Connecticut and the horrifically tragic death of 20 first graders, my fears have moved into realms I never could have begun to imagine.

When mass shootings occurred in our country before, I have been moved to tears and have felt tremendous sorrow for the losses of others far away. But this has been different. For those children hundreds of miles away, I have sobbed. I have weeped. My heart has ached. I have, at times, struggled to catch my breath. I have felt this so deeply because it is so unimaginable and unconscionable to so violently take the lives of such innocent 6- and 7-year old children.

But the hardest part is that I know exactly what a classroom of first graders looks like. My son is six and I can’t help but think of those blessed souls that were lost in Connecticut without picturing my son and his friends.

Raising a six-year old is a wonderful time to be a parent; it should not be a time to grieve. Six year olds are full of wide-eyed innocence. They believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and superheroes. They look at their future occupations in terms of what they really want to do without thought of the dollar signs attached to it. My son wants to be a police officer. One of his friends wants to be a cheese taster. Another wants to be a “fire girl.”

Their dreams are big and limitless. When the sun is up (and sometimes when it is down) they never stop going. If I could bottle the boundless energy of a six-year old, I’d be a millionaire.

Six-year olds are learning to read and they are excited to do it. My son fusses every night when we make him turn off his light, stop reading and go to sleep. He wears pajamas with cute characters on them and wants slippers that look like stuffed animals and make funny noises when he walks. He’s too young to worry too much about looking “cool” around his friends. He loves his mommy fiercely and wants to be like his Daddy when he grows up.

First graders still have pajama days at school. At recess they chase girls and girls chase them. Boys think girls are funny and laugh or wrinkle their noses at the thought of kissing them. The best part of a first graders day is often lunch time when they can test their “trading” and bartering skills with their friends. My son was proud to trade half his sandwich for a few Doritos. But he felt a little jilted when he gave up two vanilla sandwich cookies for a bite of a gingerbread cookie. These are the things you live and learn when you are a six-year old. You don’t learn how to protect yourself from the most evil monster no one could have ever imagined.

The world of a six-year old is seen from a different viewpoint…your waist. So much of the world is above them. They are about four-feet tall and quickly growing into their lanky arms and legs. Some are missing teeth (though not mine, he’s still waiting for that mountainous milestone). They spend so much time looking up, figuratively and literally, to the world around them. They trust in adults.

I don’t want to even start imagining what those precious little children were thinking when that monster came bounding into their classroom that morning. This is not a world they should ever have to know. I haven’t told my children about what happened because they are too young. One is four, the other is six and they are too young to know anything about the evil lurking in this world.

Hopefully our country will learn from this tragedy, but unless they know first graders like I know first graders, it might not be so easy. It’s going to be a long time before I can look at the children coming out of his school, out of his class and not think of that man, of those many grieving parents and of a country that needs to do better. All I want is for being six-years old to be a time of blissful ignorance again. And I want to go back to thinking the greatest threat to my first grader is peanuts.