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April 16, 2006

Reading the signs

By Michelle Martin

Morning in our house usually means about 40 minutes of intense prep work for the day—waking children, breakfast, clothes, hair, teeth, backpacks, coats and out the door to wait for their ride to school.

The routine includes a fair amount of nagging (from the parents) and foot-dragging (from the kids), and is followed by a blessed half-hour of tranquility, between the kids leaving and us needing to head to work.

But all the bustle turned silent one day when we looked up to see second-grader Caroline, 8, looking intently at the front page of the paper. She was looking at a picture of Lauren Lofquist.

The picture was obviously a school picture, with a smiling face in front of a nondescript blue background, the kind of photo every family of a school-age child has, and it took up nearly the whole page. It was there because 8-year-old Lauren’s father had been charged with strangling, stabbing and attempting to drown his daughter in the toilet. Her body was discovered by a neighbor, called over to sit with the girl while the parents went to the hospital to treat a cut on the father’s hand.

Caroline looked at the picture, so similar to the one of her on our bookcase, and we looked at Caroline.

She turned away without saying anything, and we didn’t ask any questions, either. After she put on her coat and grabbed her backpack, she went outside to play “Red Light, Green Light” with her dad and brother.

Even though no one said anything, something shifted that day. I see Caroline check out the newspaper more often—the news, not just her favorite comic strips. When students walked out of Kennedy-King High School to protest ongoing violence and demand more security, the picture in the paper showed a teen carrying a sign saying “Does somebody have to die?”

“What’s that about?” Caroline asked.

Reading is supposed to open up a child’s world, take them places they’ve never been and make them think about ideas that never occurred to them. But when she was younger and we read to her and helped her sound out the words, this wasn’t where I planned for her reading adventures to take her. When the world opens up, sometimes bad things come in, too.

Of course, these aren’t the first times she has seen or heard about evil in the world. She was 3 when airplanes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 5 when the United States went to war in Iraq. She sees homeless and hungry people on the streets.

But for all those things, I was with her to mediate and explain. Now I know I can’t always be there, and I wonder what she will make of it all.

I also wondered what children would make of Child Abuse Prevention Awareness Month, observed annually in April. All Catholic parishes and schools in the archdiocese were asked to take notice, and especially to pray for children who are or have been abused. How do you explain to a child that some people hurt children without destroying their trust? How do you not and expect to keep them safe?

That, I think, is what it comes down to. Children must know that evil exists, there is danger, and that people they trust will tell them about it to keep them safe. In turn, they need to be able to talk to adults they trust, even—especially—about the bad things.

I think Caroline said nothing about Lauren Lofquist because she had nothing to say. She doesn’t fear her daddy or me, and she can’t imagine what happened to Lauren happening to her.

But I wish I’d said something all the same. I wish I’d asked if she wanted to say a prayer together for Lauren.