Innocence

When we first moved to the area, one of my main priorities was safety.  Columbia was in the top ten for crime per capita in the nation and with Rowan entering school, I wanted to make sure that he would be protected as much as possible.  It seems my fears weren't unfounded as I recently found out that a new student to Rowan's class had been transferred to his school because of problems with being bullied.  The new kid is super sweet and reminds me of Rowan in a lot of ways, so I felt assured that we had been guided to a good place where Rowan would be safe. 

Last week when I went to pick up Rowan from the bus stop, the bus driver mentioned that someone had been killed in the ritzy neighborhood next to us and that the buses weren't going through there.  When I got home, there was a recorded message on my phone from the school that was cut off, so all I was able to hear was there had been "an incident."  In talking to some ladies in the ward, I found out that a man who was involved with gambling (a bookie apparently) had a disgruntled client come to his house, kill his wife, and threaten to do the same to him if he didn't open up the safe in their house.  The husband ended up killing the client with a gun he had stowed away in the safe.  The details are still a bit muggy, but suffice it to say I stopped feeling so safe.  That only increased when I found out that the couple's son is in Rowan's class and they are good buds.  He's another sweet kid that I've worked with multiple times when I volunteered in the classroom.  There is also an older daughter who has been affected by this tragedy.

The school has handled the situation well and even had the school counselor come and talk to Rowan's class to help them understand the situation and to properly help the boy when he returns to school.  They wrote cards to him and gave him a gift to hopefully help with the loss of his mother.  Rowan doesn't seem to realize the gravity of the situation.  When I asked him about it, he told me how his friend's mother got shot and how he hoped that wouldn't happen to us.  Otherwise it hasn't bothered him that much. But I can't help realizing that as time goes on, I will be increasingly unable to protect my son's innocence from this world.  Perhaps Steven and I will avoid having a lot of problems enter our home by adhering to what we know is right, but I can't control the choices of others.  I'm just alarmed that it is happening this early.

Rowan came up to Steve and me last night and told us that he knows 3 bad words.  In the aftermath of all of this, we braced ourselves for the worst.  I remember the things I heard growing up, most of the time not even fully understanding what they meant.  I would repeat some of them when I didn't realize their true meaning.  So I looked at Rowan and asked him to spell them out for us so we could talk to him about it.  The first one he told us, had been written on the Smart board in his classroom.

B-R-A-T
The next one was:
S-T-U-P-I-D
and rounding it out was:
D-U-M  (presumably "dumb")

Can I please just keep him this way?