Hard stuff...

While I was pregnant with you I used to talk to my belly (and in therapy, and talk to friends) about the conflict of loving you so much...knowing you were safer inside than you would be on the outside. Inside I could anticipate your needs, my body continually shifted physically and hormonally to ensure your comfort and safety... I worried about eating soft cheeses and wanting/smoking an occasional cigarette... While any number of things could have gone wrong, I had control over a vast majority of them. I got sad for you every once in a while for the loss of interconnectedness...the loss of symbiosis. I'm a kinda dark person...well, I think I'm realistic, but you talk to most other people?...I'm dark. I talk all the time to you and to Brennan (and probably anyone else who will listen) about how the world is hard...how people are sometimes massively disappointing. I talk about this so often because it is truly what I expect and feel like honesty is important in preparedness. I generally feel equipped to deal with life and people knowing and holding that they're likely to disappoint. Flawed, perhaps, but it has served me... I somehow never thought about a desire to shield you from those things. They are awful, but come with the territory. Sometimes though (well, daily actually, but only sometimes is it actively shoved in our faces) horrible inexplicable things happen. One of those things happened today in a town in Connecticut. My instinct is to swoop you up and hide you from the world. My instinct is to home school you, move us to a commune and live in a bubble. A love bubble of kindness and hippies - where my choosing your name and doing numerology to overcome your potential astrological shortcomings actually has serious impact on your life and protects you...

...the truth is I can't protect you from everything. It makes me sick to write it, but it's true. All I can really do is help you to see the world with realism...and help you to know that you, too, will be unable to fully protect or control things. As true as that is though, you have the capacity to do an awful lot, and impact an awful lot. I don't know why awful things happen. I don't know why they are likely to continue to happen despite so many people truly believing that they are good and wanting good for others... I do know that there's good. There's chaos and complicated and evil, but there is, and you can be, good. It's not the deepest thought, it doesn't bring back the dead and doesn't solve...well...much of anything. I can't express how badly I wish I had answers... a way to ensure your safety...the safety of everyone really. But if you can hold on to it as fact that there is good, it can make the inexplicable a little bit easier to bare.

I will be thankful for your being my tangible proof of good in my world forever. I love you so much...