Not coming back

After what happened to the kids in Sandy Hook,  I have been very introspective. I catch myself watching my kids doing the most mundane things like putting on their socks and even standing back and watching them bicker before stepping in. I keep thinking about those parents who lost so much that day. I can't believe what happened. I just can't wrap my mind around it. I haven't been watching the news. The last thing I caught on the news here in France was a clip of some news program where someone was saying that if the teachers had guns they could have defended themselves. What? The only things I see now are what friends are posting on Facebook and even that I am not really reading. I just can't. It's too painful. I can't stop thinking about those parents who lost so much. 

Maximilien caught me crying today while I was cleaning up the kitchen. He asked me why I was sad? He thought I was missing my mother as he knows that this time of the year is hard for me with the anniversary of her death just a few weeks ago and her birthday this week. But this time I told him that I was sad because of something terrible that happened in America. Keeping it very simple for him I just told him that many children had died and that Mommy was sad about it. Then he said to me, "They died and they are never coming back again. Their parents must be so very sad about that. If you died and never came back to me I would be sad too". His understanding of my sadness stunned me. It also reminded me that he was remembering a video we had watched a year ago about death. It was a clip from Sesame Street that I found to help explain where my mother was because he was asking a lot of questions and I needed to help explaining it to him. Apparently this video has gone viral since the tragedy in Connecticut. 

Reading another expat's blog tonight about her thoughts about the tragedy and her closing thoughts about raising her family in Australia, got me thinking about how recently I have really settled into my life here in France and that I can't imagine raising my kids anywhere else. My life was different when I left the US to move to France. I was a newly wed and children were not even a thought in our minds at that time. For the first years living in France I thought that I would move back to the US, back to all the things I tried to cram into my suitcase during that once a year visit to see my family. Gradually, I crammed less and less things into my suitcase each trip back. Then my mother passed away and things like health care and job security and having a baby really preoccupied my mind. I started my family and then providing the best life possible for these little people in my life became priority number one. Life in France became the only life I knew... I know how to be a mother in this country. It's intuitive here though to people who live outside France may find it strange or difficult. Learning about this tragedy in Connecticut makes me sick with worry for my friends back home. Friends who have kids my kid's age. How could this have happened? What is going to be done so it won't happen EVER again? No one is really talking about what happened in the US around me. I breifly talked to Julien about it and he is at a loss of words as much as I am. Only one person has mentioned it to me about that news and it was a customer at the tea house. He asked me what I thought and I was brief with my response as it got my very emotional and he said to me in a very matter of fact fashion that something like this would never happen in France. Not knowing the statistics or even the actual gun laws here in France, I agreed with him.  I just feel like this would never happen here.  In the ten years I have lived here I have never heard of tragedy like what happened in Sandy Hook. He was trying to comfort me by saying that because he knows Maximilien is the age of the victims but am I wrong to think that something like this would never happen in France? 

In any case, I find myself watching my babies sleep at night and I haven't been able ot get to sleep at a decent hour because I keep thinking about the parents who no longer have their babies. How could this have happened? 

Comments

[Sarah]

It's been so hard for me to digest, too. Like you, I've just been avoiding any remarks or stories on it because I don't have the courage to think about it for too long. What are we as parents if we can't protect our own children from such evil? For Gui and me, this horrific tragedy has solidified our plans to school Avienne in France for the same reasons you talk about here - there's no promise that it won't happen there and it doesn't guarantee that our baby will be safe, but it gives us some piece of mind, however backwards it is to think of.

[Alison]

It's weird: I feel a certain detachment from this horrific event, even though I now live in the States. But my kids live in France, and I'm just not worried for their safety (well, I *am* but you know what I mean). I have shed tears for the lost children, but I didn't have to send my kids to school yesterday and wonder if they'd be safe.

Back when Columbine happened, I was teaching at the university in my French city. And I was so upset. I reassured my students that the US wasn't like that, the Americans weren't like that. But it keeps happening. Maybe we *are" like that. It's distressing, and awful, and wrong. It's just wrong that 20 children just died because this country feels like "freedom" is more important than lives. We need to have to courage to stand up and say ENOUGH. That's enough murder.

I don't know what else to say.

[Lisa, a.k.a. The Bold Soul]

My sister teaches first grade in NJ. I thought about her a lot since this happened at Sandy Hook because it could have been HER, her kids, her classroom. She has a student this year, a sweet little girl from Syria whose family refugeed out but still have family members there, where they don't even know what has happened to them. And this girl's mother has a restraining order out against her husband for domestic abuse. My sister has to worry about what happens if this guy decides to come to the school and cause trouble. And it's not the first time she's had a student's potentially violent parent to worry about. So I'm often worried about her well-being. I mean, her grown son is in the Army and about to deploy to Afghanistan, HE is supposed to be the one putting himself in harm's way, not my sister the teacher!

And I hate to say this but this sort of thing HAS happened in France, although not on this scale. Just this past year there was a shooting at a school entrance in Toulouse, in that case it was a racially motivated attack at a Jewish school. It is just such a crazy, violent world, and all parents want to do is raise their kids in peace and love. I guess all we can do is do that in our homes and do the best we can to protect them and to teach them how to be aware of what is going on around them. I am definitely in favor of banning assault weapons and even hand guns for private citizens, although I know this is not necessarily a popular stance and it's true that more has to be done in terms of mental health care. But you know what else? I believe that we get what we focus our energy on -- and if all of us continue to live in fear and act from fear and try to barricade ourselves in a bubble out of fear or we go out and buy guns out of fear, then what do we get? A crazy, gun-filled, violent world. I think since 9/11 the fear level in America has increased 1000-fold, and we're now seeing the result of that in this obsession with owning guns.

And you know what? Max is one awesome kid. :)

[kim]

Not to burst anyone's bubble, but there was the four people killed at a jewish school earlier this year in France. And there was an armed killer in a day care in Belgium a few years back.

It may be less frequent, but let's not give ourselves false senses of absolute security.

[Aimee]

I guess I was wrong thinking that this sort of thing never happens in France. Bubble has been burst.