A clasped grasshopper, a letting go.

I can imagine his hand around her wrist, just below the fist, how he'd have to shake it to get her fingers to loosen their grip on the grasshopper she rescued from the playground. I can see how she'd respond to that, the utter dismay, the frantic worry as she scrambles to pick the grasshopper up again. And I can feel it, a sudden, horrible lurch, when he picks up his foot and stomps the grasshopper flat before she can save it again.

"I tried not to cry," she tells me, trying to keep it together even now. "I tried to keep my emotions in check, but I just couldn't do it."

My Violet is full-to-bursting with emotion, always, and the kids at school are well aware of it by now. And this one boy has been using it to his advantage, pulling and prodding, always looking for a reaction from her. We've told her many times that if it's the reaction he's after, she's going to have to work at not reacting. He'll eventually get bored with it, we reasoned. Still, how is a 6-year-old girl, so excited about catching a grasshopper, supposed to hold her reaction in when a boy very deliberately and very cruelly kills it right in front of her?

"Oh, Violet," I say. "I don't blame you at all. I would have cried, too. When sad things happen, it makes sense to cry."

When I got back to work I jotted off an outraged email to her teacher. This has to stop, my email said. No more of this, it said.  

Help her because I can't be there to do it, was what it said somewhere underneath those words. The world is ugly and I can't always protect her, is what it said even further down. Help.

There is a certain prevalent belief these days that it's hard to be a person in the world, and that the sooner kids toughen up and learn that, the better. That it's not a parent's job to protect their children from grasshopper-smashers on the playground. That I'm not doing her any favors by intervening or offering shelter in some way.

I wonder about this mentality. This curl-up-and-accept-it mindset, this shoulder-shrug of a worldview. Do I want her to look out at the great wild world and feel it like she felt that boy's fingers on her wrist? To understand that the desperate and helpless feeling of being forced to let go of something precious is just a part of life?

No. She is six. Only six. For her, the world can still be loveliness and hope and good people who care even about the smallest of lives. It should be. It's hard to be a person in the world, sure, but maybe that's because we've stopped advocating for kindness. The world is a fight for the hearts of things, even a grasshopper's heart. Sometimes especially that.