Why We Need to Talk about All of It — And Never Stop

I'm honestly having a hard time concentrating on much today besides what's been on all of our minds (and in our hearts) since the Newtown shooting. I find myself in moments of total despair about the state of our country, about the 2nd Amendment, about mental illness and the mothers and fathers and families struggling with raising a child with severe special needs while barely making ends meet. As one of my favorite mom bloggers asked, "how are we supposed to process things like this?" 

Well, I've been thinking about your question, Aidan, and my answer is this: I don't think we can. I think we have to use this utter desperation we feel to make a change. I actually hope that our complete inability to process what's happened will make us take a stand, and refuse to forget.

I'm literally sitting here in my office (read: Starbucks) in a sweaty mess of tears — and I keep trying to hide them from the ~10-year-old sitting across from me, as though a) I could protect her from knowing about something like this or b) she even knows what I'm crying about. All I can say is this — things that are incredibly ugly have to be talked about. This is one of those things. It may be extremely uncomfortable. It may be down-right awful. It may mean getting political and pointing fingers and debating how our tax dollars should be spent and who should have which "freedoms" and how we can figure out a way for some freedoms not to infringe upon others. Guns, mental illness, our constitution, our basic freedoms, our children's basic freedoms — these are not the makings of pleasant small talk. Too bad. Sometimes life isn't pleasant (as the mothers and fathers of those twenty children know). We have to talk — what's at stake is just too big. I hope this is the beginning of a national conversation that never ends.

xo,
Rebecca