About Last Night.

Last night was one of those nights when you hear a string of words that shocks you to your very core, when you know you will never hear anything as horrific as you just heard.

It's one of those key moments when you know you will never be the same.

And, how do you deal with that? You want to yell it out to somebody--because it just can't be real, but it is--yet you cannot tell a soul because it is too evil, too terrible, too soul crushing. It is so awful you just wonder if--or why--it could ever have happened.

"Do you think it was meant to be then?" asked the twenty-year-old beauty.

"No. Definitely not. God would never orchestrate something like this. It is the work of a sick, evil man. The result of his bad choice which will damn him to hell."

She listened. Bits of the gospel plan were introduced. Later, she mixed up cookies with my daughter thinking at first they were just going to cut a prepared roll of dough from the market.

"From scratch? I've never done that." She ate batter by the bowlful, and we let her. We let her say the F-word as she spoke, too, which is not allowed in our home, along with it's siblings, "Sh," "B," and others. We waited for her to to come to the point that so many of our friends do, that point where they feel something is "off" and instinctively they know it's because our language is clean, and they do not hear us speaking those ways.

She apologized. They always do. But this was different, and we understood why. I could hear the blood dripping from the cut on her heart. These issues were not something to heal underneath a bandaid, not even a band aid as big as the moon would help this case; there is only one way, one method, one man to help this case, but their temple is different than ours, and it only holds the first five books of Moses.

It's going to take a long time for her to mix this batch of cookies. She's working from scratch with unheard of ingredients. She's in therapy, and a psychology major, too. And I am just a mother of children, gathering in chicks from wandering flocks. And sleep is difficult when you've just heard the worst thing you've ever heard in your life, something you'd seen on TV years ago, and watched with big eyes, and then found it sitting, for real, in your dining room chair, telling you that you are the mother she wish she had. And the tears can't stop. The tears can't stop.