Numb.

As parents, our number one objective is to keep our kids alive. Hopefully, under that one objective, we have many subcategories. In the case of our family, they’d be to raise happy, healthy, well rounded individuals who work hard, are kind, who consider others and who love Jesus.

*The thoughts that run through the mind of Little Chelley at approximately age 8;

“Well. The mothers of the starving children in this National Geographic I’m flipping through can’t POSSIBLY love their children as much as MY Momma loves ME. They live knowing their kids might die and so they care less and they’re way less sad because they already know.”

It was too painful for me to process that way of life any way else. I had to believe in a disconnect between mother and child. There HAD to be a lack of feeling on behalf of those Mommas or else… I couldn’t imagine.

Adult Chelley absolutely knows that those mothers love their babies, and with the same passion that mine loved me. They coddle, snuggle, sing to, hope for, dream for, pray for, teach and invest into the sweet babies they have but I also know that Little Chelley understood something significant. The mothers faced the possible death of their children on a daily basis causing them to live and think differently from those in the first world.

They expected death.

I can NOT IMAGINE living my life that way. Being in that position. My stomach hurts and I almost refuse to give it a thought. I know there are families of our veterans and service members who can grasp it on some level but even if a soldier fights, there’s still the hope that he’ll come home.

These last few years, little by little, I feel doom creeping it’s way into my bones. I certainly don’t EXPECT the death of my four but the way the world is turning, it’s beginning to feel like the kids are starving (at the risk of gunfire for shopping at Walmart) and they could DIE (SOMEBODY’S GONNA KILL THEM!!)!!! I never ever want to have to consider motherhood from that perspective but if it doesn’t stop, will Lauren have to? Will Shannon have to? Will my babies live in a world where they might expect the death of their babies? That’s where we’re headed, y’all! Any one of us at any given time…. bye bye.

How I wish there was a simple, one minute solution to our country’s problem but that would require kindness, respect, consideration, compromise, some really special bill writing, a passing of the branches and I’M ALREADY LAUGHING OUT LOUD!

If you are struggling, if you feel rage, if you want to cause harm, if it’s all just too much, please communicate and try for help. This mother cares for you.