Love and Hate and Keeping Our Babies Safe

I can't stop thinking about the parents in Norway whose teenagers were slaughtered two days ago. The "crime" of those innocent teens? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time and on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum of an extremist with an agenda.

When these types of tragedies take place and parents are robbed off their children and all of the hopes and dreams they had for their children's futures as well as their own, I want to call my own children home, like a mother duck summoning her ducklings if they've started to stray too far. But, of course, I can't. Three of them are working and studying away from home, joyfully launching their own lives. And the youngest is testing the limits of freedom on home turf at the same time. In order to find their own places in the world, they need to springboard off the heady sense of freedom and possibility that is so much of being a teenager or a twenty-something. 

So I have to make peace with the idea that something could happen to any one of them at any time. Or to me, for that matter. I can't safeguard any of us from every terrible possibility in this world. What I can do is let them know that they are loved fiercely and beyond measure so that, should anything ever happens to them or to me, that will never be in doubt. My love for them is beyond place and time. I intend to tell them that the moment I publish this message. I hope you''ll find your own way to tell your children, too.