“As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again!” so said Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

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When I was in college and had a choice between used and new books, I almost always bought new unless the used book was pristine and unmarked. Before that, I didn’t have a choice. I just had to live through the scribbles and highlights of the previous textbook user. If their name was written on the bookplate, and I knew them, their reputation was taken down a notch in my mind. But after high school, I had a choice and I chose unblemished books.

I admit, I don’t like reading ‘dirty’ books. I like to keep mine as clean as possible. Because of that, I keep meticulous notes in a separate notebook. I am not obsessive about keeping a book clean, mind you. I’ve had lapses when I didn’t have anything else to write on and I just had to make a note on the margin or highlight a passage. The reason I didn’t like books that have been highlighted or marked up when I was in school was not due to any OCD tendencies either, I just didn’t want any spoilers. I want to see a passage and say to myself, ‘Wow! that’s highlight worthy!’ When something triggers a question or thought, I want to be the one to jot it down on my notebook or on the margin. I don’t want other people’s mark ups to influence how I understand or absorb or react to any book.

But I found, in the process of reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, that maybe there’s another way of looking at mark ups.

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Image source: Heather McCloskey Beck’s Photos on facebook.

“How can anyone do that?” my 15-year old daughter asked me today, to which I had no easy answer to give.

She is 15 now, not 5; I can’t sugar coat bad news anymore and I can’t honestly tell her that everything is OK, because they are not OK. No one is OK tonight, knowing that 20 parents cannot hug their babies and tuck them in to bed.

Tonight, we pray for everyone affected by this, another horrific and senseless tragedy.

Tonight, we grieve with the whole community of Newtown, Connecticut for the loss of their loved ones.

Tonight, we hug our girls just a little tighter along with many parents nationwide who are also holding on to their loved ones after the tragedy.

And tonight, as a mom, I add my tears and outrage of this event.  I pray and wish and hope that it won’t happen again, even as I know that it probably will.

And I feel selfish and guilty as I silently add, “please, not my kids”…

But I know, that prayer too, is a tenuous hope.

But when our heart is breaking, our only hope is to pray…pray that everything will be OK.

Some days, the hate, the violence, the ignorance, the arrogance and atrocities of men can be so overwhelming you just want to scream and pull your hair out. Some days I just want to have a mommy tantrum and scream, STOP IT ALREADY!!!

It makes me not want to look at the news because I still want to be able to see the good in people, I still want to be able to see this world as beautiful. I like thinking that the world I brought my daughters into can be safe and nurturing and hopeful and worth living for.

BBC journalist Jihad Masharawi carries his son’s body at a Gaza hospital. (Associated Press)
Image Source: The Washington Post

Last week,I saw this heart breaking photo and read about the 11 month child who died in the Gaza bombing. Before I even read the story, the photo already broke my heart. As a parent, I immediately felt the devastation on this man’s face. I instinctively knew the story before I learned the details.  Because in the end, there really is only one story here. A precious child is lost to his parents and to this world. It matters not which side of the conflict he’s on, another precious life is lost and the amount of grief in the world compounds.

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