A penny for your thoughts

A penny for your thoughts.  I’ve got a million. But as I grasp for the thoughts I find myself still reaching, coming up empty.  Feeling lost and like I’ve lost.  Except I haven’t.  I’m one of the lucky ones.  My heart hurts, but not in the same way as a mother who has lost her child. Not in the way that a mother plays back the last words, the last touch… the last everything.  

I sit here sick with grief for this village we call parenthood. Sick with anger, and sick with fear. Sick of posts like this. 

I sit here with a million thoughts and questions.  I sit here helpless, yet always hopeful. Hopeful for healing. Hopeful for change. Hopeful for safety.  It’s naive to a certain degree, I’ll give you that, but without that hope how else do I find the courage? The courage to fight. The courage to raise boys to become men who recognize their emotions and do not flee from them, but to speak to them and face them. 

There’s no politics to debate here tonight, and even if there were, this isn’t where we’d do it. But here is where I come to mourn tonight.  The loss of innocence.  The loss of life.  The loss of infinite stories. 

I am the mother to two elementary age boys, I am the mother in a school district where there was a shooting this year, I am a mother who cannot grasp the concept of waving good-bye to my kids as they enter school and never seeing them again.  

My heart, my empath heart, is so heavy from this burden.  But my heart loves.  And tonight it loves a little extra more.  Because I’m the lucky one that can.