She has two children and takes care of 90 more, including a 4-year-old who was napping nearby with a blue teddy bear tucked under his head.
On Thursday, Sherry Kalinowski sat in a child’s chair in the Fairyland Nursery School she runs on Chicago’s Northwest Side and tried to explain through tears how her world has shuddered on its axis.
“As a parent, the biggest struggle is figuring out how you protect your children and still give them the experience of living they need,” said Kalinowski, who is 44 and the kind of mother who wears a Tweety Bird T-shirt to work because the children like it.
Only last year, she and her family moved to Arlington Heights because she thought it would be safer to raise her children there than in the city.
“Now I know that no matter how much you try to protect them, evil can penetrate,” she said.
It was a lesson that Wednesday’s federal building bombing in Oklahoma City brought home with an emotional force equal to the blast that has killed dozens, including at least 12 children in the second-floor day-care center there.
The explosion could be felt 40 miles away. But the repercussions shook people hundreds and thousands of miles away-in every city, suburb or village where parents must leave their children with others in order to go to work.
Across the country Thursday, attendance at day-care centers in some federal offices was down. But in Chicago it appeared to be “business as usual,” said Faith Wohl, director of the federal Office of Workplace Initiatives, which oversees the centers.
In parents’ hearts, of course, it wasn’t business as usual, no matter where they dropped their youngsters off Thursday. Over and over, they shook their heads trying to explain the sense of emptiness where once there had been a greater feeling of security about their little one’s well-being.
“I went home and when I watched TV and they talked about . . . children being killed, I kept seeing the faces of the children here,” Kalinowski said, gesturing around the darkened room filled with children on cots.
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Another face haunted many: The image of a limp and bloody child carried in the arms of a firefighter. The child died despite the valiant rescue attempt.
“The first thing I saw this morning-when I looked at the paper-was the picture of the the fireman carrying that child away from a `safe’ place,” said Tracy Robinson, mother of two young boys.
Robinson spoke for an entire nation when she told of the nagging guilt and uncertainty that working parents awoke to Thursday.
Robinson described her daily ritual of leaving son Justin, 3, at St. Michael`s Day Care Center at 83rd Street and South Lake Shore Drive while she goes to work at Loomcraft Fabrics, north of the Loop. It’s hard enough to say goodbye on a normal day, she said; it was twice as hard to kiss him goodbye Thursday.
“If I thought about it, I’d drive myself crazy,” said Robinson, pushing away her worst fears. “I’d be in tears all day.”
“I had second thoughts when I was watching the news and when I first woke up this morning,” said Mary McDonald Pascale, a law clerk for U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald Guzman. Pascale’s son, Alexander, attends day care at the Metcalfe Federal Building in the Loop.
“I said an extra Hail Mary this morning when I was walking away (from the day-care center),” she said.
“It could happen anywhere,” said Susann Lipinski, director of the A-Karrasel Child Care Center at 3416 W. Fullerton Pkwy., where 70 boys and girls screeched and laughed after milk and cookies glazed with sugar, just up from their afternoon naps Thursday.
“I saw the picture in the newspaper and I thought, `How vulnerable we all are.’ It happens all over and it’s now hitting home,” Lipinski said. Nonetheless, she said, no parents told her they were keeping their kids home Thursday because of the bombing.
But Brenda Lopez came close. She spent Wednesday night watching the gut-wrenching televison coverage, the pictures of the women running with wounded babies in their arms, and debating whether to skip college classes to stay home with her own children, Gabriel, 5, and Crystal, 4.
“You think, `It could happen any day. Anywhere,’ ” said Lopez who lives on the West Side.
Many of the parents thought they had shielded the children from the horrifying news of the bombing, that their kindergartners knew nothing of it. Not so.Several dozen preschoolers, in Barbie and Power Rangers T-shirts, sat in a circle at A-Karrasel and almost every hand shot up when they were asked if they knew what happened in Oklahoma.
“They put a bomb by the building and all the kids blew up,” said Kanesha Walker, 5.
“The bad people parked the car and then exploded and some people died,” said Anthony Shrewsbury, 5. “Some people survived!” jumped in Jonathan Felix, 6.
Parents and teachers struggled to explain the unexplainable. At Fairyland, kindergarten teacher Eileen Tomich wondered if she should let her class believe a car made the building fall or try to explain the concept of a bomb to group of 5-year-olds.
She went with a simplified version of the truth. And that’s what experts recommend, albeit tempered with compassion and recognition of children’s capacity to understand.
“Children are going to be frightened,” said Ellen Gerrity, a psychologist and acting chief of the violence and traumatic stress research branch at the National Institute of Mental Health.
“It’s going to make them wonder if it can happen to them.”
Adults should remember that children will look at the bombing very differently than they do, cautioned David Uttal, an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
“A lot of the things that we use to control our fears-a sense of probability, a sense of geographic distance-are less available to children,” Uttal said. “Adults can deal with the scary situations. . . . That’s not as true for young kids.”
Parents should not dismiss their child’s fears, he said.
“Don’t just say it’s going to be OK, because children know better,” said Uttal. “You can’t just minimize their concerns.”
Registered nurse Mary Walker, came to fetch her daughter Kanesha at the center on West Fullerton.
“Each day I try to do the best for her,” said Walker. “So, if something happened, I wouldn’t feel like I didn`t give it my all,” she said.
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