At 6:30 every morning, I can hear him before he even gets downstairs. I hear him roll out of bed and hop down to the floor, then shuffle his way across the room. I hear him walk downstairs, a slow and steady thump down each step. From my place on the couch, I wait for him under a blanket.
He reaches the bottom step, hair tousled, mismatched pajamas, half-sleepy smile across his face, and without a word, he slips under the blanket with me for his morning snuggle. I wrap my arms around him, and he hooks his arm around my neck and plays with my ear—a muscle-memory remnant from his babyhood. I watch his eyes as they roll across the darkness and fixate on something across the room, and I wonder what kinds of intense topics a boy of six could be thinking about. I don’t ask him, for fear I will interrupt a profound and complex process.
He is the one to break the silence. “Worms have antennas,” he announces.
“They do?” I ask. “I never knew that. Have you ever seen a worm with antennas?”
He doesn’t answer. He is quirky like that. He just continues on with his thoughts, before he finally rolls off the bed and onto the floor. I wait for his head to pop back up again. He laughs.
From there on, the morning drill begins. I’m off to the kitchen trying to figure out yet one more way to disguise an egg so he will eat it. I lay out three little lunches, fill thermoses with water, fill backpacks and scramble around in search of three matching pairs of shoes, while he heads off to the mudroom, releases the dogs from their sleeping quarters and leads them to the couch. He drapes himself across them and begins reading from whatever library book we read the night before. He will not be interrupted until he finishes. He doesn’t want to let down his captive canine audience even for a second.
One by one, his sisters wake up. Eva, wild-haired, grumpy and rubbing her eyes, curls up in fetal position on the couch opposite her brother and waits for me to greet her. From the baby monitor I hear “Mama! Heeeeelp!” which is Anna’s cue that she needs to be rescued from her crib. I carry her downstairs, blankie still dangling from her grasp, and plunk her down on the couch. The three siblings glower at each other.
“Say good morning to your baby sister, you two!” I say, and the two of them eek out a mumbled “Good morning, Anna.” I disappear back into the kitchen, and by the time I return with their breakfast, the three are on the same couch, engaged in full hand-to-foot wrestling combat.
“Tyler! Be gentle with your sisters!” I caution. From within that wiry 35-pound frame, the boy doesn’t know his own strength. They gather around the table and flip through the recordings on the DVR, until I hear the opening tune from “Wow Wow Wubzy.” They giggle along and eat until 7:30 approaches, and the bus is near.
I round the corner with Tyler’s coat and shoes. “Put these on,” I direct him, and my eyes fall to his bare feet. It seems like there’s always a glitch a moment before the bus comes. “Go upstairs and get a pair of socks,” I say.
He says nothing. He sits very still.
“Hurry up!” I prod him, feeling my first surge of impatience for the day. “You’re going to miss your bus!”
“I’m afraid to go upstairs by myself,” he stammers.
“Afraid? To go in your room? Nothing’s in there. You’re perfectly safe. What in the world are you afraid of?”
“Bears,” he whispers.
I take a long, slow breath. “Tyler. You just slept in your room all night. You’ve been sitting here all morning. Did you happen to see a bear walk into the house and up the stairs at any point?”
He doesn’t answer. The terror in his eyes answers for him.
And suddenly I stop. These days, the bear in his imagination isn’t so far-fetched. It comes in the form of mentally insane social misfits wielding assault rifles and magazines full of bullets. How can I promise him that at any given moment, a monster won’t walk through the front door and unleash terror in the middle of our living room, or in any other most unlikely place? That’s what monsters do.
Being a parent this day in age comes with a massive sense of guilt—because we brought our children into a world much scarier than we ever had to grow up in. When I was six, the only thing I had to worry about was that Mrs. McCormick wouldn’t have any more of those orange peanut butter crackers in her snack drawer. Mrs. McCormick never had to worry about how she’d shield us from a barrage of bullets. My parents never had to send me to school wondering if it was the last time they’d see me. And the only monsters we kids worried about were the hairy, sharp-toothed beasts with googly eyes that chased us in our dreams.
In our own kids’ world, monsters are flesh and blood, waiting in the wings, plotting that one last chance to leave the world that wronged them in a way that no one would forget. Christ. These days, monsters even come in the form of orange peanut butter crackers.
I bolt down the stairs, socks in hand, then watch him stuff each foot in a shoe and fasten their Velcro straps. Spiderman backpack clunking with lunchbox and thermos in side pocket, Tyler and I leave the house together. It is raining a bit, and I pull up his hood. We stand under the porch together and wait for the sound of the bus roaring up the street.
“Can I have my good-bye kiss now?” I request. I know as soon as he hears that bus he’ll be off, and any meaningful good-bye will be out of the question.
He smiles, bottom tooth missing, hair that was once patted down springing up again on the side, wraps his arms around me, and plants about a dozen kisses in a row all over the side of my face.
He lingers for a moment, eyes so close to mine he looks like a Cyclops. “I made you a gingerbread house yesterday,” he says.
“Really? Where is it?”
“It’s still at school. I’m waiting for the glue to dry. And I made your name out of popsicle sticks,” he adds.
And suddenly, I think of twenty children just his age, making gingerbread houses of their own, excited about the holidays, fashioning gifts for their parents out of glitter and glue and beads and cotton balls and popsicle sticks. And then I think of an empty school not more than an hour away, full of ghosts, silence echoing down every corridor.
When the bus arrives, he wiggles out of my grasp and makes a run for it. It’s a nervous reaction; in his world, missing the bus would be a tragic disaster worthy of international news coverage. I step down from the porch and watch him run.
And suddenly, as the rain comes down, he stops halfway down the driveway, turns around and smiles. I watch as he climbs those bus stairs, throws his backpack on the front seat, slides toward the window, searches for me and waves, hands flapping so fast I think they might fly off his wrists. I don’t stop waving back until that smiling face in the window disappears out of sight.
My heart is in my throat. But I can’t think about it for long. It’s time to get the girls ready for preschool.
Goddamn the real-life monsters who have taken the magic out of those yellow school buses, red-bricked school buildings and classrooms full of ABC posters, activity centers, books, laughter and gingerbread houses drying on their shelves.
And God bless those beautiful old souls in little bodies from Sandy Hook.
