Hugging My Cub Tightly

Hello, tender friends!

While I’ve got a lot of content backed up, it seems disrespectful to not acknowledge the Trump assassination attempt. Praise God that he’s okay, but as a mom I can’t stop thinking about Corey Comperatore, the firefighter father who threw himself on top of his family to protect them but who was killed in the process.

I’ve been intermittently crying and hugging Cubby since finding out about it. Also, FYI, there will be no triggering photos of the attempt or political strife. That’s not what this post is about.

The Sandy Hook shooting in 2012 affected me similarly even though I wasn’t a parent yet. Victoria Soto, the teacher who put her students in a closet to protect them but was shot and killed herself, and I were the same age at the date of the shooting.

I was teaching for a nonprofit at the time (Teach for America if you’re familiar with it) and looked at my room full of fourth grade students. I prayed and prayed that God would tell me what to do if I ever faced the same situation. While it was never tested, I promised God I’d do whatever he told me to do to protect my students, even if it meant doing what Victoria did. (I’m not saying that to sound heroic, because that wasn’t quite it- it was a more pragmatic view that I was older and had gotten more out of life already than my students/knowing that God would give me peace if he called me to such a sacrifice).

This bit sounds macabre, but the other truth is that I had decidedly less to live for at that time.

After the Sandy Hook shooting, our principal sent an email urging us to “slow down and just be with our students.”

And while I had told the Lord I was willing to die to protect my students if that’s what he chose, I found actually slowing down to be present with them impossible.

The driving force behind everything I did at that time was an obsessive need to close the education gap or opportunity gap or whatever you call it. I never got caught up on the semantics of nomenclature myself. I just worked and prayed and worked more, always using their academic achievement as my north star.

Of course, as a mom, I see all the lost opportunities. All the times I was too hard on them (yes, this still haunts me and it is still something that I pray about 14 years later), and all the times that they needed something I was incapable of pouring out. Instead, I taught them vocabulary and fractions and sacrificed my health.

I didn’t know how to slow down and just be there for them. The environment didn’t permit it, and the terrifying possibility of losing academic momentum with them was a risk I never once took.

Lord, please redeem this, I have prayed for years.

I look at Cubby’s clear blue eyes and impish grin. I really look at him, especially the past few days. He invites me to play in his “cities” (a collection of laundry baskets, blankets and random toys spread out in different designs) and I do.

I do all the things I never slowed down to do for my students. I still feel haunted by them and still pray.

But God is good. And this is a form of redemption. Learning late is better than never.

Ok, that’s all for today, tender friends. Like I said, lots of new content is backed up, so maybe I’ll do a quick recipe on Thursday to lighten things up.

Thank you for stopping by, and thank you for sharing!

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