People Just Like Us
Last week I cried longer and harder than I have in a very, very long time. For three days, I dropped my kids off at school with visions of picking them up at the close of the afternoon in body bags. I could not shift that image from my mind as the hours of the morning ticked by.
“Where are they right now?” I wondered, as I sorted the laundry. Were they sharing their good news for the day? Were they out for recess or nibbling on a morning snack? Were they thinking of me as I fixated on their little bodies ducking under desks as they tried their best to stay quiet? “Please stay quiet, please stay quiet,” I pleaded. Or maybe they should run. Maybe I should tell them to just run and keep running as fast as their feet can carry them. Maybe we should all run.
The day before, moms, dads, grandparents, and caregivers ran toward Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in search of their children. Handfuls of these families were eventually confronted with the unthinkable. 19 murdered children. Two teachers. How is that an acceptable day in America? How can the news cycle ever move on from such a story? But it does, and our thoughts and prayers move on with it, eventually bending to whatever fresh tragedy fills the latest headline.
I thought after Sandy Hook a boundary had finally been crossed. I expected Americans to collectively call for our freedom – freedom from the fear of being gunned down in a supermarket or during science class – but those aren’t the freedoms we care about. We’d rather send our kids to school with security officers and lock down drills practiced like clockwork. These drills couldn’t save 21 people last Tuesday, and neither could the resource officer.
It is beyond my understanding, that in order to protect certain freedoms, our kids will need to be expendable. It’s our second amendment or us as any talk of gun reform has people burying their weapons in the backyard and congress in an eternal moment of silence. We’re past that point anyways with the number of firearms in America far exceeding the number of people, so the question becomes, “How do we keep from destroying ourselves with our own “God-given” rights?”
As a parent, it seems this might mean eliminating some of my family’s freedoms, like the freedom to attend a traditional school. I have zero desire to teach Math from my kitchen table, but the thought of being herded into some community center to learn whether or not my sons survived the next classroom shooting is more than I can bear. I am not strong enough to shoulder that grief.
My kid broke his finger at recess the other day, and with his head cradled in the crook of my elbow, he told me how he got himself through the pain while he sat in the office awaiting my arrival. “I just kept telling myself that Mommy was coming, and you would know how to calm me down and make me feel better. I just kept saying, ‘When Mommy gets here, everything is going to be okay.’”
While his sweet words initially brought me joy, after last week’s massacre, I cannot help but picture him in that classroom, circling these words over and over in his mind as the sound of gunshots carries down the hallway. I will be miles away, changing a load of laundry, emptying the dishwasher, sending an email, doing any of the hundred mundane things that I do every day while across town my child is being used as target practice. And I will not be able to save him.
Enough is enough is enough is enough is enough. The list of students killed by gunfire at school could fill this entire page. Read the name of your beloved on that list. Say it out loud, then imagine the lengths you would go to prevent it from happening.
A couple of days after the tragedy, my second grader recited what one of his classmates had told him about the shooting. “Mama, he said that an 18-year-old boy went to a school and killed two teachers and 19 students. He said he went into an elementary school.” He paused, waiting for my response.
I had given him a watered-down version the night before, not telling him the shooting occurred at an elementary. I couldn’t.
“That is true, buddy. That’s what happened.” I knew the question that would follow.
His words came slowly, as if he was as afraid to ask as I was to answer. “Will that happen at my school?”
I sat a moment. The balance between hope and honesty is delicate.
“These terrible things don’t happen at elementary schools very often, and nobody knows why this boy decided to do what he did or why he went there. But you know those drills you do at school?”
“Yes. We hide under our desks and cover our head if a tornado comes,” he said, wrapping his little hands around his ears.
“And then sometimes, we all have to be very, very quiet. And I am so quiet.” He searched my face for approval.
“That is so good, and that is exactly why your school has you practice those things, so you know what to do if any kind of danger happens. It’s good to have a plan, even if you never need it.”
I want hope to tip the scale, but I can’t lose sight of honesty. These things do happen, and they happen to people just like us, people who told their kids that lockdown drills were just for practice, then went back to folding clothes for children who would never come home.
Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage