Innocence lost

Caroline is loving the new school. Every day at school she flops into a comfy chair with a blanket and  loses herself in a book that she picked out from the class library. This week she read a Magic Treehouse book and when she finished that she chose The Diary of Anne Frank because the title contained my name, Anne. A few nights ago she started to tell us about it but then said there were a lot of things in the book she didn't understand, like why Anne had to wear a star that told everyone she was Jewish.

It was an unexpected moment, as these moments always are when we're parenting. We went from talking about sitting in comfy chairs and singing This Old Man in first grade to discussing the horrors of war and genocide.

I'm a practical parent, not one to hold back on the realities of life. Living in a big city, the girls are exposed to a lot. I like the urban factor. There's grit and meanness and scary things out there. My girls know the world isn't all dolls, ponies and pink tea sets, or Benderoos, their current toy of the moment.  We've discussed the homeless and poverty and prisons and civil rights and death many times.

But this was different. There was something so tragic about telling my girls that something as terrible as The Holocaust happened in their world and that genocide still happens in our world. It felt like this was the moment that ended their innocence. And I wasn't ready for that.