Sometimes I Want to Apologize

After a crazy, intense, drama-laden couple of days, heck, maybe weeks, I found myself awake in those still, wee hours when the night is at its darkest, watching my kids sleep. It’s something I love to do, something I’ve loved to do since the first night my daughter was born. Those moments are so quiet and sweet, unadorned and still and deep. It’s when the chaos and stress that fuels the day subsides, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my dreams, and sometimes…an apology.

That’s what I started doing last night, watching their innocence, still so pure in so many ways, and, with a hard squeeze of my heart, apologizing for what I know is waiting just around the corner, the world they’re stepping deeper and deeper into every day…

For the culture we’ve somehow created, one punctuated by anger and animosity, by rudeness and sarcasm and hard, sharp, ugly edges, edges that slice clear to the bone.
For idolizing those without morals, and ridiculing those with.
For making everything so wonderful and perfect that kids don’t know how to deal with adversity.
For telling them that they were a rock star or princess so many times you started to believe it.
For trophies for participation.
For letting the Internet into their lives, and for letting said Internet dissolve into everything it has dissolved into.
For freedoms and privileges which require decisions they’re not ready to handle, that they can’t possibly be ready to handle.
For enabling kids to share their lives with thousands of strangers, and wrapping their self worth up into something as meaningless as Clicks or Likes.
For Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, for Snapchat and Vine and, holy crap, Lulu.
For photoshop and airbrushing and everything else that promotes an idea of perfection based on the surface, rather than what lies beneath.
For a new wave of fun and games that should be neither fun, nor games.
For a society that thrives on pitting right versus left, white versus black, Christian versus non-Christian….
For reality TV that glamorizes drama, not friendship and compassion.
For songs on the radio, the ones with the catchy rhythms that make you dance, but whose lyrics are saturated with words we don’t say in our home…words we’ve taught you not to say.
For celebrating the fight, not the peace and the glory.
For removing anticipation and wonder and surprise, innocence, and replacing them with ugliness and hurt, with not realizing the tragedy of growing up  too fast.
For promoting hate.
…and marginalizing love.

I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry for the maelstrom closing in on you. I know there is still so much that is good, so much beauty and joy that surely awaits them, as well. I do. I know that. But so much of motherhood, it seems, is about fear, and the good is not what I fear. So as I sat there watching them, feeling the inevitable winds of time blow closer, I found myself reaching out and stroking my five-year-old’s soft blond curl, wishing that one moment could last forever. That I could take you to away from this world we’ve created, to some magical island, some magical place, where you didn’t have to experience any of this. That I could keep them there with me, safe, insulated from bumps and bruises and hurts of all kind, from disillusionment. That the gooey smiles and gleeful giggles would go on and on. The hand-holding, the hugs. That I could freeze time, and hold him and his sister close. Forever. But I can’t do that. They have a life to live. Mountains to climb. Worlds to explore. So instead, after my apology, I found myself making a silent vow, that I would do whatever it took to teach them right from wrong and about true beauty and grace and compassion, that I’ll protect them from dangers both seen and unseen, even if doing so results in them resenting the hell out of me. Or worse. Because that’s what love is, and that’s what I’m going to give them, the soft love, the tough love, and the forever love. No matter what.

In the end, it’s the best lesson, the best gift, I can ever give.