TV and reading is emotionally different once you have kids

Before I had kids my favorite show was Law and Order SVU.

I have a double major in History and International Studies. My concentration in history was the Holocaust; in International Studies it was Human Rights. I wrote my history thesis over medical ethics, detailing the gory, atrocious experiments done to many people, including children, during World War II. My International Studies final presentation was over Human Trafficking in SE Asia, primarily the trafficking of little girls for the purpose of sex slavery.

These things all made my stomach churn, of course. Writing an essay over child soldiers made me depressed for a week. I got drawn in and attached, but not so deeply that they gave me nightmares or I felt like I couldn't watch, read, or study such things. I never avoided them and I rarely cried.

After I had H I stopped watching SVU. It'd freak me out, thinking of these terrible things ever happening to my children. Even fairy tales where the mother died would rip my heart out.

But nothing struck a chord so deeply quite like the book I'm currently reading.

I've had the same, terrible nightmare now for three nights all because of one single page in the book.

The book is "The Storyteller" by Jodi Picoult. She's been my favorite author for the past ten years and I'm always first in line to purchase her newest book.

Her last two books were slightly disappointing for me, so I was thrilled that this book was so enticing and the storyline was intriguing. It tells the story of a 25 year old girl who (unknowingly) befriends a 95 year old SS Guard who worked at the same concentration camp her grandmother had survived.

During the man's recollection of being a guard he tells how during one extermination a mother carried her toddler daughter to the ditch of bodies they'd been ordered to lay down on top of for their murders. The mother, telling her child not to open her eyes no matter what, tucks the little girl into the dead bodies as if tucking her into bed. She then sings a lullaby to her daughter. After the slew of guns have gone off the little girl is still beneath her now dead mother, wrapped lovingly in her arms, singing the lullaby as well. The guard shoots her in the head.

I've dreamt this scenario 3 times now. Each time it's my dear H and I, and the dream, the very idea, is far too much to handle. The idea of something so terrible happening to any precious life, most especially my own child, is simply not fathomable.

It's crazy to think I once could read and watch this kind of stuff, and although it made me upset, it didn't affect me half as much as it does now. Before I had children. Before I understood what it truly meant to watch my heart walk outside of my body.

Needless to say, I'll be screening even my books better from now on.