Happy New Year! It has been quite some time since I've written and I am ready to get back into it, cause I have a lot to talk about. You see, I think I have the opposite problem from many writers I know: I have a hard time writing when I am not in a great mental or emotional place. I can write when I'm angry because I find humor in my anger, but if I am sad or deeply disturbed by something I can't bring myself to write about it until I've worked through it. Hence, my last post being about the children on the Upper West Side who were murdered by their nanny. I couldn't bear that information. It hit me so close to home and I couldn't stop thinking about that Mother's gruesome discovery, and about how her life would be forever in changed in the worst way possible. I was also sickened by people who were politicizing it, saying that if it had happened in the Bronx then it wouldn't be front page news. Maybe not, but, two children were brutally murdered by their caretaker..who gives a shit if hypothetically it had happened somewhere else it wouldn't have been as big of a deal? That's NOT WHAT HAPPENED and focusing on that as a topic of discussion the same week it occurred was disgusting to me. It still is. I cried for the children, I thought about how scared they must have been. I thought about how the little girl tried to defend herself. I thought about how many times the Mother must wonder if she would still have her family intact had she come home 10 minutes earlier. I thought about how it would drop out of the news and people would forget. I promised myself not to forget those two sweet children and their surviving family. I don't think about them every day, but I do send good thoughts to them every once in awhile. I hope to do so forever.

Then, we had Hurricane Sandy. That was a blast. Story to follow in the next few days.

As we were nearing Christmas, I was thinking I would write a few anecdotes about the holidays when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. That was incomprehensible to me and to the rest of the world. Needless to say, I couldn't find the words to write about it and honestly I still don't have any. Reading the accounts from the parents who lost their children had me in tears one after the other. I hope that all of those families who lost children or a loved one find peace one day.

Both of the above stories made me squeeze my little girl harder and with more frequency, which seemed impossible. President Obama recalled a saying that having children is like walking around with your heart outside of your body, and that couldn't have been more poignant. I love my daughter with a boundless and certain love that I have never known before. Like all forms of love, it is vulnerable, and the stories above are the actualization of BEYOND the worst case scenario for any parent. I used to be the person who clicked my tongue at parents who would say that people without children just couldn't understand certain things. Now I know they were right.

I am happy to have written my thoughts, and will now tuck them away into my heart. Thank you for reading this, and I will write more regularly from now on. Promise.