The grandkids are talking about murder...

The grandchildren are sitting at the dining room table and talking about murder.

Real murder.

Real murder that involved people some of them have met.

None of them seems to be frightened. None asks if this could happen to them. And, as I watch the discussion, I am just a bit frightened by their lack of fear.

Welcome to childhood.

This isn’t the first time for me. When their moms were younger, we encountered two situations in which estranged husbands murdered family members, and my girls had met/visited with both killers. In one case, an otherwise-nice guy who was the neighborhood painter ended up killing his ex and running away with their daughter. In the other, an estranged husband killed his daughter and himself as a final act of revenge in a nasty divorce battle.

Fast forward to 2026 and their own children, at pretty close to the same age they were at, are talking about the same topics. Two of the granddaughters lost a schoolmate when his father stabbed his mother, only to have the schoolboy intervene to protect his mom and become the second victim of the knife. The mom survived, but he didn’t.

The conversation continues as they relate less gruesome tales about alcoholic fathers, estranged relatives, and a school lockdown precipitated, not by an active shooter, but by ICE agents employing military tactics to arrest a cleaning woman across the street. (TBH, I’m not 100% sure it was a cleaning woman, but it was definitely a non-violent target whose capture involved much more money and drama and scared children than the situation required.)

There seems to be a bit of bravado here, at least a small desire to show how much trauma they’ve experienced, and survived. Maybe that’s good for self-defense and sleeping at night, but they’re much too young to be talking about this stuff with such nonchalance. Some part of their childhoods, their innocent years, has already passed. I don’t know precisely when it happened, but it was too soon.

I should have expected this, because kids are always absorbing things while we aren’t paying attention. They hear us talking about friends and family, jobs and politics, and also about them, while we think they can’t hear us…if we think about it at all. The video screens are always visible with sometimes frightening images and, as soon as they learn to read, the chyrons expand their knowledge of the world.

Most often, they’re looking at the news, and it isn’t pretty.

One thing I enjoy with grandchildren who live nearby is the opportunity to see them develop in real time. I don’t see them every day, sometimes less than once a week, but the tempo and consistency create a moving image with only occasional gaps. Growing up is a combination of both lived experiences and theoretical learning, the stuff we do and the things we only absorb second-hand. By the time they’re adults, they need to know the good and the bad, what’s achievable and what’s beyond reach, which friends are reliable and which aren’t, and a million other details in a very complicated world.

It’s pretty normal, I guess, although I wasn’t aware of this rite of passage when I went through it and I am pretty sure I didn’t recognize it when my kids joined the parade. I’m seeing things differently from this end of life, though, and the patterns are clearer than they once were. This is how we learn, we grow, we adapt, we cope, we survive.

In a way, I should be encouraged by this conversation. They encountered and absorbed the evil, or the awareness of it, without being visibly damaged along the way. They are changed for the worse, but that’s a price they have to pay on the road to maturity. Without a doubt, there will be more toll booths ahead. 

Fasten your seatbelts, kids. This ride is only beginning.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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