I Won't Do That  

I spent two hours last night pouring over one of the saddest blogs I've ever visited. When I was finished, I had a pounding headache from the seemingly endless tears I cried reading this family's heartbreaking story of losing their eight-month-old son to a brain tumor.

This morning at the gym, I picked up an old issue of Ladies' Home Journal to find an article about a mother who'd lost her three young daughters in what was then a nationally-publicized wrong-way vehicle crash.

I read the first three paragraphs of this article before emphatically closing the magazine and letting it drop to the floor beneath my elliptical trainer.

I just couldn't read another word.

The internet -- whether through blogs or news stories -- is full of sad stories. Heartwrenching stories. Terrible tragedies that make you realize how lucky you are to have two healthy kids.

But these stories tend to have a deeper affect on me. When I read about the baby boy with the tumor, it made me scared to death that my son would experience the same fate. When G was little, I read a blog about an 11-month-old boy named Sage who had died from SIDS; it gave me anxiety every night as I laid G down to sleep until she reached a full year old. When I read magazine articles about a family losing all their children in one horrible accident, it makes me want to hunker down in our home and keep the car permanently in park.

I've said on this blog that you have a choice -- to read or not to read. Funny, but I never realized that I have a choice as well. In the past, I've chosen to read these stories and, in the process, internalize them to some degree.

This makes me sad.

This makes me fearful.

This makes me paranoid.

And while, yes, it also makes me hug my children a little more tightly and realize how lucky we are, the negative emotions associated with reading these devastatingly sad stories far outweigh any positives.

So, I'm making a choice. I won't be reading these stories anymore. Not to say they don't have a place on the web, or on the news, or in my favorite magazine; they are an important part of the human record. But they are not for me... not until I can learn not to process them so deeply, to a point where they own my feelings.