When I went to bed last night and when I woke up this morning, I heard the reassuring sound of my children breathing in their dreams.

I went in their rooms, kissed their heads, smelled their scents, and walked away comforted.

I am blessed to be free and able to do these things.

I am lucky to live in a country where my life is not threatened, where my children are safe, where we are at peace.

I am fortunate to have never been uprooted, never had to leave all I know and love to find a safe place for my family.

Today, I am troubled, shocked, dismayed, and viscerally enraged when I think of families being separated at the border of another ostensibly safe and free country; the United States of America.  All I can see in my mind are the arms of mothers reaching for children who have been ripped, crying, from their bosoms.  All I can hear are the screams for parents taken to detention without having been given time to say goodbye or comfort their little ones.

While my children slept peacefully with mother and father only a few steps away, thousands of children just like them have been drowning in a sea of uncertainty and fear.

My heart breaks to imagine the tiny child lying in a strange room, in a strange cot, surrounded by strangers and a strange language.  I wonder how my three year old boy would cope, without the parents he so depends on and loves.  I can hardly do it, visualize that pain, without feeling my soul slashed within me.  To consider my eight year old daughter, alone, at risk, in danger, spins my mind in ways I would rather not go.

And what about the parents?

If I were suddenly faced with my children being dragged off, crying for me, with no way of knowing what happened to them or if I would ever see them again, I’m not sure how I would survive.  We are talking about the children, and their trauma, but let’s also consider that their parents (who are only trying to find better lives for their families) are going through a different but equal trauma.  Who will soothe their pain?

Today, I find myself a part of a movement of people of equal minds, equal wills, who are trying to make a change for good.

Let us hope, pray and wish that these families will be reunited and that the pain they have suffered will eventually be calmed.

And let us also hope, pray and wish that enough of humanity will continue to take a stand against evil, so that we are not thrown backwards in a wormhole of time to another place, another face, another monster long dead.  Let us not repeat history; let us forge anew a world where children are safe with their parents and no one fears that their safe haven will be instead hell on earth.