Dear Reader: Valerie’s daughter attends school one mile away, in the town of Sandy Hook. Her school was on Lockdown earlier today.
How do you talk about this? What words are there for explaining to your child that someone, for whatever reason there could possibly be even in the most warped brain that has ever been made, even if the person was mentally ill and couldn’t help himself, could have walked into a school that is around the corner from hers, and killed 18 little children, babies really, mowed them down with an assault rifle? And if he truly went there to kill his mother in her kindergarten class… OMG OMG. There is nothing, nothing at all that a person can say that works, that will make sense, that will make it better.
How do I be a mother and not make it better, not try, not know what to do? Helpless, powerless, weak mothering. I-can’t-fix-it-mothering. How do I not puke just thinking about it? But if I vomit it all up, every ugly image and angry terrified thought that is racing through my brain will be out there. I will not feel better but worse.
How do I comfort my older children, who are around the age of the shooter, who are about to become parents themselves?
We carry it in the pits of our stomachs, in our throats, in our tightened shoulders and clenched jaws, in our eyes tearing up but not wanting to let loose because we won’t be able to stop. We know it is in there gathering up all the unfinished yuck that lives inside us from past grief and fear, and we also know tears will not be enough to drown it. We cannot stop ourselves from identifying with the parents who were waiting for hours, hoping beyond hope. We look frantically for explanations, for every little detail that indicates it couldn’t have happened to us. That we will be safe in the future.
Try hard. You won’t find any. The world isn’t safe. Unspeakable horrors happen. In small towns. In America. Parents are identifying their children’s bodies, shaking with grief, or numb so they will not implode. Parents who have to tell their other children, who are still breathing, something beyond horrible, and deal with the nightmares that will go on and on. Who will probably not be able to get beyond the first word of it before the ugliness overwhelms with a force no one should ever feel. Parents who will be with the funeral directors, who will be choosing little coffins–that should never have been made–and clothing that should have been worn to parties instead put onto lifeless bodies.
There will be talk of gun control and mental illness and family problems and god knows what else that could be behind it. The school should have been more careful—really?? In a quiet little town?? The week before Christmas?? Maybe some good dialogues will happen, some questions asked. Like always, the questions will stop and in a few weeks, everyone will have moved on, forgotten the dead and the maimed–everyone but the parents and the children and the siblings and the friends of the ones who will not be here in a few weeks to forget.
Vomit, cry, punch the wall, hug your child, walk and talk and pray and do whatever you can to move this through your body. Don’t let it live there. There is little we can do for our children but let them talk, keep their lives as structured and nurtured as possible, and get it through ourselves as well as we can—allow the shaking and the nausea we are feeling to move through so we can be there for them and show them that sadness and pain are survivable. Even though we cannot stop evil, or even see it coming, we can do our best to move on. We can refuse to let it win.
Don’t try to hide from it. Walk and talk. Accept the feelings, the shaking, the tears, the curiosity, the images in your head, and the ones your children are experiencing. Those are the ways your body is trying to heal. Affirm their experience and at the same time, remind them that they are OK by bringing them back into the moment—hold their hands, tell them that whatever they feel is OK. Ask them how they feel with a sense of wonder (open ended questions); remind them it won’t last forever. Do the same for yourself.
Read the work of Peter Levine—Taming the Tiger and Trauma Through a Child’s Eyes. You can pull them up on your Kindle right now.
Valerie Gillies, 53, is a licensed family therapist and EMDR clinician. She and her husband of 31 years have five children, aged 14-29. She became especially interested in a holistic approach to behavioral health after they adopted their youngest at age nine. Since then she’s been trying to learn as much as she can about neuroplasticity and healing trauma. She is working on her Master’s in Nutrition, and writes on her adoption/attachment blog: www.whirlingmoms.com whenever she has the chance.