Like most of the country J and I have spent the weekend trying to make sense of the events in Connecticut.  We both heard about it at work, and both of us spent the day trying not to cry while doing our jobs.  These aren’t bad things that happen to other people, they are horrifying events that could happen to my babies.  Tragic events strike deeper levels of horror in me now that I’m a mother. 

Since having Clare, and now Sam, I walk around with a well of hell inside of me.  It’s the hell that would unleash, consume, dissolve and destroy if something were to happen to one of my babies.  It’s the worst kind of hell I can imagine, so I try hard to keep the lid on it.  For the most part I do a pretty good job – y’know, I watch them fall down and get back up again, they skin their knees, they go to school, they will drive and eventually move away.  I accept this and keep the lid tight on the well so that the worry doesn’t consume me. 

But it’s there, it’s always there, and sometimes the lid lifts when I hear of tragedies like the one in Connecticut.  I spent all day Friday imagining the parents, the horrible fear that their worst hell was about to come true.  I’ve thought about those children and how scared they were.  I imagine my own babies scared, crying, needing me and not being there.  But mostly I’ve been feeling for those parents, the ones who were so scared and now so grateful.  Also for the ones who are suffering beyond the fear, suffering beyond the imaginable, to that hell.  I’ve spent most of the weekend keeping a brave face for my kids, trying not to go there, not to lift the lid, fall into the well – the well that wouldn’t let me go if I went all the way in. 

So I held on.  I held onto soft fingers, pudgy thighs, silky hair, and wiggly little bodies.  I held onto made-up songs, babbling “Momomom,” giggles, shrieks of laughter, and “I love you.”  Mostly I held onto the present, the now, the tangible, the life… that is, them.  I held them because I could.