tears of sadness

in the last couple of days i've broken down in tears a few times. pbs has come up to me and said, "mommy? you're crying? let me give you a hug and kiss to make you feel better." i wish that was all that it would take to make me feel better.

when i've started crying it's because i was reading an article on the newtown, ct elementary school mass shooting and i was thinking about the parents of all of those children. i can't imagine how those parents, both those who lost their children and those who did not, feel. i can imagine what it's like to lose a child and my heart completely breaks every time i even think about the evil and cruelty in our world.

there was even a point when i spoke with js on the phone, he's been on travel for the last week for work. he hadn't heard what happened. when i told him what had happened, we talked about home schooling pbs. i don't really feel qualified to home school him and i want him to have a so called "normal" childhood, which would include going to a real school. i would like to send him to a private parochial school because i went to private parochial school from preschool through high school. js is on the public school side because he went to public school from kindergarten through high school. after this latest mass killing, we might be more on the same page.

 

it's not that a private parochial school is any better or safer than a public school, but i think that i would feel that it was a bit better and safer because i could have a say and see where the money was actually going. i know that bad things happen in these schools too but it doesn't seem to be as often or even on the same scale. class sizes are smaller and there are more opportunities for individualized instruction. 

here's an example. i went to a very small school. it started when i was in third grade with a total of 23 children. we had combined classes. so in my classroom it was second, third and fourth grades. kindergarten and first grade were combined in another room. there were eight of us in these three classes, all of us girls. fourth grade was the highest grade, kindergarten was the lowest. the preschool was separate. we had the principal as our teacher in the morning and the preschool teacher as our teacher in the afternoon. the principal and preschool teacher were married to each other. 

now, fast forward almost thirty years...js and i moved to the west coast and started going to a church where my third grade teachers were attending. they are some of our closest friends and are pbs' God parents. i don't think we would have found a relationship like this in a public school.

it's not fair to have to make these kinds of life decisions for our children. i know that we make life decisions for them from the time we find out we're expecting, but why should we have to decide where to send our children to school based on whether it's safe and secure? i guess the days when parents decided to send their children to a school because of it's academic reputation are gone. 

i'm so saddened by all of this, especially because it seems to be "normal" to have a mass shooting.