For Our Sons

The summer before I started junior high, a girl my age disappeared from my part of town.  She was pretty and blonde, and her story captured San Antonio’s attention for one long, hot month.  I was terrified to begin seventh grade, and as the days inched closer and closer to the start of school, I also watched the news each night, awaiting word that she had been safely located.  I had just celebrated my twelfth birthday and still played with dolls, and I didn’t yet know the evil that existed within the world.

The day before school started, her body was found, and the knot of dread that had been growing in my stomach all summer exploded into fear.  I remember my confusion at the circumstances of the story, and how my dad gently explained that she had probably been killed the very day she went missing.  Her killer was never found, though there was an investigation of a prime suspect, and it remains a cold case that haunts San Antonio to this day.

When I think of starting junior high, I always think of that summer and the loss of innocence I experienced through her tragic story.  As a girl, I tried to imagine the type of person who could do something that terrible, so that I would be able to recognize him from across the street.  As if I could see him coming, the anger apparent on his face, and have time to get away.  He was older and scary, and that’s all I really knew.  I didn’t really want to know more.

Even now, when stories of missing children appear on the news, I try to close my ears and guard my heart a little, if only to keep out the sadness.  But this past month, two young girls in two different states were abducted and later found dead, and their accused killers are teenage boys.

That, to me, is absolutely shocking.

I am the mother of two little boys who will be teenagers before I know it, and I can’t imagine the transformation that must have occurred between the innocence of preschool and the lives of those boys now.  And this is not a defense of the suspected killers or a rant against the aspects of society that lead to such terrible things.

It’s just the observation of a worried mother who, when I read the news headlines on two separate occasions this week, was absolutely shocked, and I need to write about it to think it through.

Those boys, with their acts of unthinkable violence, ended the lives of two innocent children, and also ended their own, in a manner of speaking.  From what little I’ve read, the circumstances in each case are extremely different, but the results are exactly the same.

And for me, that signals a huge wake up call, especially to the parents of boys.  Parents like me.

My boys are still very young, but already I’m realizing the power of my words and the power of my actions, and I know that I have two small sets of eyes watching my every move each day.  I’m trying hard to set the best example possible for them, and I fall short each day, too.  Parenthood sometimes feels like an uphill battle, but I love my little guys with my whole heart, and I want them to grow into happy and well-adjusted young men.

I’m still such a new mom and I can’t offer advice to other parents, but I am trying to love my boys fiercely while also showing them a gentle path to adulthood.  I want to protect them and shelter them always, but they will have to grow and learn about the realities of the world, just as I did.

And that is such a hard lesson for a parent to learn.

In both of these current cases, the mothers of the boys turned their sons into the police, and I cannot begin to imagine the emotions those women are currently experiencing.  What the days ahead will be like for them, and how their lives are also forever changed.

I can only pray for them, as I pray for my sweet sons each night, while I try to change the world, just a little, one boy at a time.