times such as these

I find a fat red circle on the paper where my initials should've been the past three nights, indicating fact fluency practice. Or lack thereof.

What I want to say does not fit in the parent signature box. Their father took the boys to the bar for nachos and a lecture on super nova. They had piano lessons with a musician who pushes them up against their potential in the kind of encouraging symphony every child deserves to hear.
They read comic books on the back patio, drank after-school smoothies while the sun was shining. They put clean laundry away and watched cartoons.
They did not do flashcards.

There was a shooting here last night, caution tape strung at the corner of the same street I pushed the stroller along yesterday. I pulled waffles from the toaster this morning, squares full of syrup, while fire ravaged a country across the sea. While cocktail glasses clinked in another hemisphere, while college kids returned to campus, while birds sang and babies cried and missiles launched.

It feels silly to worry about multiplication tables, and silly not to. How is a person supposed to do ordinary, mundane things in a threatened world?
The fact that beauty and suffering coincide is both unbearable and remarkable.