I used to stay on the playground with Sierra when we got to school in the morning. Every morning was the same. We held hands until she saw her friends, then she bolted. She swung circles around the playground, ignoring everything but the moment. But she always came back to me before they all lined up to go inside. One last check. One last touch with home base.

Now, a few months into her kindergarten year, I just drop her off. She insists. She walks onto the playground, turns, and waves, and runs to meet her friends. It takes all I have not to park the car and give her one last hug.

But I don’t.

She’s at school. She’s safe.

##

I was at the grocery store a few minutes after I found about the shooting in Connecticut. I walked in knowing that, at that point, 18 kids were confirmed dead. Grade-school aged kids. Kids just a few years older than Sierra, killed by a weapon that should never have been put on the market, within the confines of one of the few buildings a kid can really trust.

People were smiling. They were talking about email. They were putting bows on liquor bottles. They hadn’t heard.

No one had heard, yet. I felt as if it wasn’t real.

One by one, people hear. And they argue for – or against – better gun control, and they argue for – or against – better resources for mental health, or they just try to piece together what still doesn’t seem real: Eighteen kids. Dead. In their school.

This is how I cope. I write words on something for which there are no words. I stay out of the debates because other people can fight those battles better than I can. I struggle to hold back from platitudes. But that’s hard. Because what do you say?

There are no words for what happened today. There will never be words for this.

Eighteen kids. What do you say to that?

Fuck.

##

There are mornings when I fight with the kids. They are too slow, or they are not listening. They are pushing the envelope; testing their limits, causing lateness and anger and exasperation.

There are times when I’m totally fed up with one thing or the other, when I struggle with our kids’ disappointment in gifts, their inability to reason like an adult, their general childishness.

I send them off to school. They come home and we’ve all had time to cool off. Hugs. Stories. We start anew, because we are filled with love and there’s nothing that could stop that.

Today, in Connecticut, there are parents who had fights with their kids, who felt exasperated, who were worried about whether or not their kids would like the Christmas presents wrapped under the tree, who had cooled off and were thinking about dinner that night, who dropped their kids off at school knowing that they would see them just a few hour later. Who got a call – or, even worse, still haven’t gotten a call – and found their lives shattered. Who found that they will never get resolution.

Our President is on television, crying. There are parents who thought their kids were always going to be safe at school. There are gifts under the tree that will never be unwrapped.

There are no words.

Sierra walks up to me, her back straight, her leg bent in a way that suggests she’s trying out for ballet, her eyes expectant, and she asks me if I think she’s pretty.

This is not the first time. And it won’t be the last. But every time, the answer is the same: “You’re beautiful, Sierra. And you’d be beautiful even if you weren’t wearing that dress.”

It’s not always a dress. Sometimes it’s her hair. Sometimes it’s the way she’s dancing.

Every time, I struggle.

Sierra is nearly five, and Isaac has just turned three. They are both brilliant children, raised in a home filled with love, taught to understand empathy and responsibility. We fight against culture to prepare our children for disappointment, for the realization that some people don’t understand kindness and that kids can be cruel. We try to teach them that it’s not their fault if someone is mean to them. That there’s a world out there that we can’t help but be confused by, one that hoists trivial characters into the mainstream and often neglects true goodness.

We can teach. But we can’t shelter.

Our issues are more simple than those of others. My kids are young. They haven’t felt self-conscious because their friends are tormented for their weight. They haven’t learned about how rape culture still persists, and how it will always linger, unable to move forward because insensitivity toward the topic still serves as its most common defense.

But my kids have been excluded from games, or from groups, in the past. And that act alone has left them scarred; their introduction to cruelty clashing hard with their upbringing. They still have a hard time understanding that people can be horrible, even if they don’t mean it. Even if they don’t realize it. And they hold each insult and exclusion close to the heart.

Each insult is another lesson. Each exclusion is another callus.

I don’t want that to happen. Naturally. Obviously. But.

It breaks my heart that, somewhere, somehow, someone will suggest that these kids – kids who wouldn’t hurt a single living thing, who love humanity and trust too much – might not pass muster. It makes me want to pull out what hair I have left and swear and hit things.

All I can do is help prepare them. Build their confidence. Help them understand cruelty. Provide unconditional love. Help them be happy. Help them be good kids.

Sounds mushy. But I won’t prepare them for the worst, because I don’t even know what the worst might be. There’s still a sliver of a chance that the worst will never occur – that they’ll grow up to become smart and confident kids who don’t give a shit about weight and status and beauty and success and only care about what makes them and those they love happy.

Until then, I’ll just continue doing what I do.

“You’re beautiful, Sierra.” “You’re handsome, Isaac.”

“No matter what.”

Last night Kerrie and I went to a short seminar on Getting Your Child To Sleep, put on by Sierra’s preschool, and we sat at tables and listened to a woman talk about why children don’t want to go to sleep, and we fidgeted and played with our phones because it turns out the information didn’t apply to us, and then the woman put in a video of a 1980s-era episode of 20/20 about solving sleep issues, which featured a family that had issues getting their son to sleep through the night despite their routine of rocking him WHILE LISTENING EXCLUSIVELY TO LIONEL RICHIE ALBUMS every single evening, and we all laughed and thought that was WONDERFUL because, honestly, who could sleep with that kind of party going on?

And now I can’t find a video clip as evidence.

And I’m afraid it was all a dream.

Please don’t let this be a dream. Please let the Lionel Richie family be real.

Please?