It was supposed to be a simple assignment -- a little something to remind the kids about their lesson on adjectives. Magazine and newspaper clippings + lots of glue + fancy descriptives = an easy lesson and the perfect student work display for the parent/teacher conference.

We all drank in the oversized poster boards, us parents patiently waiting in the hallway for our turn with the teacher. Mari pointed lazily at the big navy blue sheet she worked on with her group; there were cars that were "slick" and "fast," desserts that were "tasty," and chairs that were "pretty" and "comfy."

And then there were the postage stamp-sized, newspaper cutouts of young black men, three of them spread out across the paper. Beneath each of them, written in simple, neat black bubble letters was one word: Evil.

The hell?

This. This is what hurts me to the core. Because no baby should have to fight and claw and wrestle like this. And certainly, no mother or father should have to stand by and cuddle and rock and rub and put on the brave face when her or his child is suffering. I can not, for even one second, put myself in Jennae's shoes -- imagine the might she must muster to steel her back and square her shoulders and smile for her daughter's sake, even when tears have sapped every ounce of joy there is to be had.

What's worse is that Jennae's family doesn't have health insurance. Her husband? Looking for work. Jennae? Self-employed. The medical bills? Insurmountable. With all that's on their mind, they're also facing the very sad, very scary reality that the care baby girl needs may not be within their reach because they neither have nor can afford health insurance.

This is what was going through my mind the other day at the grocery store, where my babies and I waited patiently as a mother juggled babies of her own while the cashier pored through her groceries, telling her what and what not was covered by her food stamp benefits. The particular brand of light bread she picked up was a no-go. Beans, a yes. She had to tell her older girl - she looked about Mari's age - to put the gum back into the candy rack. "No gum, baby," she said softly.

I recognized the look in her eyes - saw her shifting from one foot to the other, desperate for the cashier to be done with the questioning and the fumbling and the "you can" and the "you can't" pronouncements so that she could take her milk and her bread and her no-name cereal and her beans and her chicken and her rice and go on home - far away from the cashier.

The numbers are incomprehensible — 50,000, 100,000, half a million. Perhaps we’ll never know — never have the accurate accounting of the unspeakable loss mother Haiti has suffered at the hands of a massive earthquake that shook the small, impoverished Caribbean country to its core.

There are small glimmers of hope — a church group lost and then found, a missionary and child advocate pulled from the rubble of the orphanage where she taught and inspired.

I try to hold on to those shiny pieces — need to. But the dark cloud of death hangs low and thick over the light, billowing over and under and all through mother Haiti. Mothers and fathers are burying their children. Aunties and uncles and cousins and neighbors are digging through the rubble, desperate for life to rise up from the ashes.

"I don't believe professional athletes should be role models. I believe parents should be role models.... It's not like it was when I was growing up. My mom and my grandmother told me how it was going to be. If I didn't like it, they said, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out." Parents have to take better control." —Charles Barkley

I admit it: I thought former NBA player-turned-sports analyst Charles Barkley was a jerk when he said that infamous quote years and years ago. Like, ballers, rappers, movie stars, radio and TV personalities -- practically anyone with any remote connection to entertainment -- spends their (working) lifetime trying to make us love them, and then the years after their 15 minutes of fame trying to get us to stay in love with them, even though the hotter, younger, better version of them has come along and rendered them completely irrelevant. Did he really think a kid -- perhaps one on a school basketball team -- who watched him push a basketball up the court wouldn’t want to learn some of his on- and off-court moves? Or that a child who maybe dreamed of being a popular singer wouldn’t want to study how, say, Janet Jackson became such a meteoric sensation? Or that a star’s money and fancy clothes and flashy things wouldn’t have some kind of effect on impressionable little people?

I mean, really: Telling kids not to look up to superstars who became superstars by demanding the world look up to them seemed so ridiculous on so many levels, I got hot just hearing Barkley’s name.

But then I grew up.

And had me some babies.