It’s been an emotionally-draining week.
Working in news can be exciting, fun, rewarding, and often desensitizing. We see the worst (and sometimes best, but mostly the worst). People complain we show only the negative things, but it’s our job to expose reality in hopes of creating change.
This week, we lost three children in three separate, but equally awful tragedies. First, a toddler just a few months younger than my son Hayden, who drowned in a pool. The very same day we were doing a story on the first-responders who went to that incident, they were called to a 10-year-old girl who was hit while crossing the street with her brother. She died two days later. The following day, an 11-year-old boy on his bike was hit and killed by a semi. My heart ached, my stomach hurt.
I won’t even touch on the standoffs, shootings, and other situations we covered this week.
Oh, and to top it off, we started our week with active shooter training— just two weeks after the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings, and just days after I sent my daughter off to first grade.
Guys, it was just a lot. Sometimes we do “feel” the news.
I see some of our newest hires, and they get into this business to try and expose truth, tell stories that need told, and they have this sparkle in their eyes.
I saw that sparkle dim in the eyes of one this week.
The reality— sinking in— that as beautiful as this world is, man, it sucks.
The best journalists are the ones who’ve had their hearts broken, the ones who have lost, the ones who can relate in some way to the heart breaking stories we have to tell.
But at the end of the day, at the end of a long week, this job is a reminder that life is precious, and short, and we should be soaking up every moment we get. That we shouldn’t hold grudges. That we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff… and that we should always end every goodbye with a hug, a kiss, and an “I love you”.
The Unapologetic Working Mom 