Dear parents … it’s OK to not be OK

What’s the harm in that?

I’ll admit I’ve fallen under the cartoon’s spell, too. In one episode, an ambulance speeds off to a kitten’s house to help with a serious emergency: an itch behind the small cat’s ear. Important stuff.

Our son George, 2 and emotional, rests his chin on his knuckles whenever we turn it on, his attention held, at least until it’s time to go outside and blow bubbles.

My talks with God always feel a little one-sided, especially lately. So I’ve come to ask this to no one in particular: Why isn’t the world all helper cars and bubbles?

Tuesday afternoon, I turned my television to something other than cartoons for the first time in weeks, for the sole purpose of seeing my Axios colleague Emma Hurt do a scheduled interview about the Georgia elections.

I left the damn thing on after it was over. About an hour later, I caught chatter of a school shooting in Texas. At first, they said, two kids had died. Then 14. Then 18. Finally, 19.

Here we are in yet another episode where everything is evil. Online, the script was the same. Hollow words yelling at hollower words. Empty prayers upon fruitless outrage.

So I threw the phone to the end of the couch and wept. And that’s OK.

All across the country, people drafted their own strategies. What to say and when. Who to blame and how. In our own Axios Slack channels, my coworkers coordinated coverage, because that’s what they had to do.

But all the coping mechanisms and social media posts and grasps for distraction left little room for the thing we should’ve been doing — grieving.

I’m 42 years old and I cry more now than I did when I was 21. My mother-in-law spent nearly 50 years working in news and covered countless tragedies, and she told me they got more difficult each time. I’m convinced she would’ve worked forever if not for the fact that every day in this profession brings the possibility of seeing news of a kid dying.

So yeah, it’s OK to retire. It’s OK to sign off the internet. OK to go to the beach early for Memorial Day.

It’s OK to squeeze your kid so tight they get scared, and OK to wet his floppy white hair with tears. It’s OK to be mad at politicians and to find strength from a basketball coach, if that’s what you want.

It’s OK to wonder what makes you so much more fortunate than the families of 19 children in Texas today, and it’s OK to prepare for a tomorrow in which you could be the unlucky one.

It’s OK to feel disgusted that you expect that.

It’s also OK, my fellow North Carolinians, to be perplexed that your state Legislature carried on with a press conference, just hours after a school shooting, to tell us they were launching legislation to protect parents — a so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights” — only to make it center on banning educators from talking to kids about gender identity.

It’s OK to say, as many folks did, that the only right you wanted to hear about in that moment was the right to have your child come home alive.

If you’ve spent any time with a kid, you’ve likely felt the fleeting hope that they could be the ones to save us from this mess we’re making. In the Publix, George takes the little kids’ carts up to other shoppers’ carts and taps the front and says, “Cheers!” Watching the grumpiest adults melt, I wonder how it’s possible he’s the first person I’ve seen do that in my life.

And now 19 more of those little hopes are gone in Texas, killed while wearing little shoes that arrived in little shoeboxes that were a little bit bigger than last year’s, with little lives that probably started with little baby announcements that somehow ended in worldwide coverage on cable news.

It’s OK to not be OK with any of this.

So last night, when I wasn’t OK, I put down my computer from 5:30 to 7pm to go out for a quick dinner with Laura and George.

We ordered mac and cheese. When we asked him about his day, he said, “mac-cheese!” When we asked him what he wanted to do after dinner, he said, “mac-cheese!” We could’ve asked him what the meaning of life was, and he would’ve said “mac-cheese!” and frankly who would’ve argued?

My food was slow to arrive and toddlers get antsy, so we put “Helper Cars” on the phone for 5 minutes.

“Cars, cars. Cars, cars,” the theme song goes. “Windshields, wheels, trunks and doors. They drive and honk, we ride along, and then together sing a song.”

And when we got up to walk away, he started crying, not wanting the show to end.

I picked him up and told him it’s OK, I didn’t either.