A Life Without Worry Doesn’t Exist

Watching what has happened at Virginia Tech over the last few days has upset me considerably. On Monday, after listening to the reports of the massacre for several hours, I quietly put Brock to bed. Braxden was already sleeping and Braeden was in her room reading books. I leaned down to give him a kiss on his forehead just as I do every night, and like a bullet piercing through my heart, I realize that there will never again in my life be a time where I do not carry worry.

I began thinking how easy it would be for some crazed person to step foot in the kids’ pre-school class and simply unload, or how effortlessly a gun-carrying psychopath could march into Braeden’s gymnastics class and start shooting. Braeden’s starts kindergarten in a few months and anyone can walk in and out of those buildings. Just writing about it now scares me to no end.

I once heard a quote that talked about how parents feel about their children. I’ll probably get this wrong and I have no clue who said it, but it was something like, “Having children is forever deciding to allow your heart to exist outside of your body.” After watching Monday’s events, how can I, or how can any mother, protect my children from these events? How do I teach them to be safe if some mad-man steps in front of them with a 9 mm?

Those students and professors at Virginia Tech woke up Monday morning and went to class as they did every other morning. They didn’t know that in only a few short hours, they’d be fighting to stay alive…and some, as it sounds, didn’t even have the opportunity to fight before their end. And like them, our family has our routine where every morning, we wake up and go to school and go to work, and we have no way of knowing if we’ll see each other again at dinner.

Virginia Tech has once again reminded me, like some many other events where people are hurt and killed, that I cannot protect my babies from the world. I can only control those things of which I have control…which, needless to say, is very little. My primary defense is to simply pray for their safety each and every day and offer thanks that I am so blessed to have the pleasure of putting them in bed at night.