Tomorrow is Monday. Back to school for three days before the winter break. I will be sending the three younger ones, whose classrooms will be abstaining from any discussion of the events on Friday. The boys will stay home and get Christmas items done, such as personally written cards for their teachers. There are many: Maurice, Tom, Beth, Carolyn, James, Jill, Denise. Maybe we will take their dad to buy hockey skates, their gift to him for Christmas. They are in a classroom with students ages 6-9, and I cannot dictate what they hear from their peers. By Tuesday the day should be more about the excitement of the holiday, (which recedes from me this weekend). About vacation. About cheer.
We never have the television on at home. They watch movies that we decide upon together. We watch Curious George and Max and Ruby on DVD. We watched, yesterday, Sleeping Beauty.
They don’t know. They still have their innocence on this front intact. Their minds are full of Santa’s momentous journey and when do we bake him cookies and things of this lovely nature.
I have had a low-grade headache since Friday. When I decided not to pick them up early, not to run and let my unbridled need for them knock them all down, but rather to just be “normal.”
I think Governor Malloy (of Connecticut) said it best this Sunday. He said that we can say the words, We feel your pain. But really, we don’t. Those parents feel it. They are feeling it right now. And the knowledge of this just doesn’t leave one’s psyche. Of the world they must now live in, without their babies.
