When Words Aren’t Enough

I’m trying to find the words today to be funny or witty or just share some motherhood musings, but I can’t.  I learned about the attack last night in Manchester at an Ariana Grande concert with an alert that popped up on my phone.  At that time there were no confirmed casualties and much uncertainty.  I woke up this morning, brought Charlotte in bed with me with sleep rimmed eyes, and read that there are so far 22 deaths and 59 injuries.  Two confirmed deaths are an 18 year old girl and an 8 year old girl.  ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks and are seen celebrating online.  The bomb used was sophisticated and filled with nails in order to inflict as much damage as possible.  I am crying as I write this, because I cannot believe we live in a world where someone could be filled with so much hatred that they are compelled to blow themselves up in order to kill children and young adults.  Individuals who haven’t even started to live their lives fully yet.  That these people can celebrate such an atrocity.  I don’t understand it.  I don’t know why this is the world we live in.

These people were out to have a good time at a concert.  How many concerts have you been to?  I’ve been to so many and can not imagine the terror and horror these people had to face.  I can’t imagine being at an event in which you are there to have fun and end the night running away from an explosion.  I can’t imagine being a parent going to pick up a child and you can’t find them because they are dead or injured.  Why does this have to happen?  This world we’ve brought our children into is so very different than the world I grew up in.  I feel like I never want to let Charlotte out of my sight even though I know that isn’t a feasible answer or any way to respond to a situation like this.  But I don’t know what else to feel other than sheer terror that things like this continue to happen and can be done anywhere at any time.  It’s like nothing is safe.

It sounds cheap and empty to me to say my thoughts and prayers are with everyone that was affected by this horror.  I don’t know anyone in Manchester, but I can’t stop thinking of those people I don’t know, and the faces I’ve never seen before except for those plastered on the newspapers, of the dead and wounded whose lives are irrevocably changed.  But that’s all I have right now.  All I have are my thoughts and my prayers, and I send them over the ocean, a world away.  I pray for the families who lost their beautiful kids.  Kids they have probably complained about just like I complain about my own.  Kids who they would give anything to have back.  It seems stupid to me right now to have a blog to bitch about my kids shitty sleeping habits when things like this happen.  I would stay up every day for the rest of my life with my shitty sleeper if it meant something like this would never happen to her.  I’m sure these parents now feel the same.  I cannot imagine what they are going through and my heart breaks for them.  I pray for the young people who now have this experience in their lives.  Nobody should go through something like this, least of all children.

Words aren’t enough.  But words are all I have.  God bless the people of Manchester today and every day.

Hold your loved ones a little tighter today, guys.  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  Call your families to say hello.  You never know what tomorrow may bring.