Columbine

Every once in awhile someone asks me why our family decided to homeschool our children. I always wish I had a lofty, highbrow answer to give -- something along the lines of, "Oh, my husband and I both speak eight languages, do complex mathematical equations over brunch, and read in Latin and Greek for entertainment so we want to make sure our children visit Cambridge at least twice a year and have an audience with winners of the Nobel Prize in science."

But I can't lie. The truth is that we plunged headlong into homeschooling while our first child was still in utero because of Columbine.

I didn't know it at the time, but the life I was living and thought I'd continue to live was radically changing as the events of the morning of April 20, 1999 unfolded.

That day, the day two highschoolers shot up Columbine High School in Littleton, CO and killed 12 of their classmates, a coach, and finally themselves sent shockwaves across the nation.

One of those waves hit me right in the stomach, figuratively speaking, where my firstborn child floated in the dark safety of my womb.

I was only four months pregnant and this baby meant more to me than, well, life itself. I'd been coming to grips with the fact that babies take your energy and turn it back on you, that they come into the world the center of your universe and duly self-centered.

But I didn't plan for a tragedy to take the model of maternal self sacrifice to a whole other level.

When I got home from work and flipped on the TV only to see the endless loop of footage from Colorado, I snapped.

All I could think about was how the parents of Cassie Bernall, Rachel Scott, Corey DePooter, Isaiah Shoels, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Kyle Velasquez, Steven Curnow, Matthew Kechter, Lauren Townsend, John Tomlin and Kelly Fleming sent them off to school that morning, fully expecting them to return home alive and well that afternoon.

Their precious and beloved sons, their beautiful and talented daughters -- all gone.

A lot of folks mourned the loss of those young lives. I found myself mourning for their parents. So many dreams and expectations . . .

Sheer panic swept over me and I began to cry, wondering how on earth I'd ever be able to let my child go off to school on that fateful, inevitable First Day.

What if she didn't come home? What if, what if, what if?

When my husband got home from work that night, I told him I wasn't letting our daughter go off to school. "Never?" he asked, a bit perplexed but also wary of a pregnant woman with a vow and a mission. "Never," I affirmed. "At least not for many, many years and even then we'll have to weigh it carefully."

And thus it was that we decided to homeschool. In the beginning, we did it out of paranoia, fear and the near-obsessive love most parents feel at the sight of their newborn child.

Over time, we began to see other virtues to our new way of thinking and living with our daughter as we added more children and delved into the astonishing array of learning opportunities unconfined and undefined by traditional classroom walls.

I don't know whether we'd have opted to homeschool if there had been no Columbine. I wish I did. I wish I could say unequivocally that we were dedicated to the ultimate sacrificial style of parenting from the day I found out I was pregnant, but I'd be lying.

Teaching your own children is not easy, it's not even always fun. It doesn't come with an ironclad guarantee that your kids won't grow up to do stupid or bad things and it does usually force radical restructuring of every single priority. It leaves scant room for self indulgence. It compels a family togetherness practically unheard of in an age in which children and parents are regularly disconnected from each other by space, time, and multiple love affairs with televisions, video games, cell phones and computers.

Columbine propelled me into the best life I never dreamed I'd have even as it shattered the lives of so many others, and it taught me from the very beginning of my parenting experience that every day with our children is a gift of monumental importance.


In memory.