I miss my bubble

As much as I love technology and blogs and facebook and the internet as a whole, there is a part of me that misses the days before all of this. Not because it complicates my life or because half the time things just don’t work right but for a deeper, more emotional reason. I miss my bubble. Prior to the internet (and getting older and more aware) I lived in a little bubble, not always a happy bubble and not one that was never touched by the cruelness and pain of the world but one that didn’t know as much as I know now. Yes, with age and experience comes knowledge but that knowledge can bring pain and heartbreak and knowledge that yes….some women can’t get pregnant and yes…babies and children die.

The blog world is filled with these stories and as much as I try to look away and not read I feel myself drawn to these stories like a mosquito is drawn to a bug zapper. I know before I even read them that I will cry and I will feel sorrow and hurt and pain for these children and their parents but I read. Then the realization hits me that while I am sitting here at work and my older children are at school and my toddler is enjoying a day with her Daddy, there is a family sitting at the bedside of a child the same age as my precious daughter watching their child take what are most likely her last breathes on this earth. I find myself flooded with emotions and tears that I fight to hold back but they escape here and there. I find myself longing to be with my daughter and hold her tight and tell my teens how much I really do love them even though they might not always believe me. I find myself looking at my daughter’s picture and wondering how I got lucky to have a healthy child and could my luck run out tomorrow. These parents aren’t bad people, honestly they are probably much better parents and people then I could ever be but it happened to them. It is their daughter who is dying as we go about our normal day.

I used to not understand how much death really affects a person until I lost my Grandma Betty. Losing her hurt and it hurt a lot but she had lived a long (albeit not as long as we would have liked) life and had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It makes it easier to grasp and understand. But when a baby or child dies either from disease or a tragedy or at the hands of a monster I can’t comprehend it. It doesn’t make sense, it isn’t right, it isn’t fair. These stories that I read on blogs and the news stay with me and I carry these children with me, like the little twin boy who was thrown down by a daycare worker and crawled to his favorite bouncy seat to die or the high school girl who was hit while crossing the street to get on her bus by a careless woman driving an SUV or the little girl who is losing her battle with cancer as I sit her writing this. I will carry these children and they will cross my mind as I see my children prepare for the bus in the morning or watch my daughter dance around the living room in her tutu or kiss her goodbye in the morning while dropping her off at daycare.

So why do I continue to click on the links that people send or post telling of the stories of these precious children whose lives are cut short? Maybe because I need a reminder from time to time just how lucky I really am. Maybe I need to be reminded that even though raising two teens and a toddler is tough, the alternative is something I NEVER want to experience. And maybe it is because these children need to be remembered. Their lives, albeit short, were precious.

So tonight when I go home, I will be a little less stressed with the teens and take a little more time with the toddler. I will remind them just how much I love them all and just how precious their lives are to me. And after everyone goes to bed and the lights are out and the house is quiet, during those moments before sleep takes over, I will probably shed a tear for these little ones whose short lives have touched my heart and soul.