I still remember where I was when I found out. It was early afternoon and I was sitting on the couch with my newborn son. I had just nursed him and he was asleep on my chest, gently breathing. It was 2012, and I didn’t have a smartphone yet. I was scrolling through the news on my laptop when I saw the headlines. Mass shooting. Multiple casualties. Elementary school.
As I took this in, my heart was in my throat. In just a few minutes, I had to pick my own elementary child up from school. He was in kindergarten, close in age to many of the children who had been killed. Children whose parents would not be able to pick them up from school that day. Children who had been sitting at their tiny chairs reading, drawing, and spelling, laughing with their friends. Children whose lives were taken from them in one horrifying instant.
When I went to pick up my son, my smaller son strapped in a baby carrier on my chest, I was crying. I cried as I scooped my sweet golden-hair boy into my arms, as I took his small hands into mine and walked toward the car. I wasn’t the only one crying. Every mother I saw looked shell-shocked and rushed to meet their child as the school doors opened.
We knew we were the lucky ones
We knew the same exact thing could have happened to our children. We pictured our own children lying on the floor in a pool of blood. It was impossible not to do this, to have this image spin through your mind on a loop.
I was sure that after Sandy Hook, something would change. Yes, there had been mass shootings before, even in schools, but none this big, with children this small. If Sandy Hook wasn’t enough to make a change, what was?
I spent weeks in anger and dismay watching what happened next. Lawmakers who were trying to do the right thing, and other lawmakers who were stopping them. It’s hard to know the exact right remedy for something like this, but it seemed clear that a mentally ill young man with a preoccupation with violence should not have access to assault rifles. It seemed clear that we could start by making that far less likely.
But, no, nothing changed
Nothing.
Instead, school kids of my children’s generation were subject to lockdown drills every few months. My kids became experts on how to find good hiding places. How to remain silent for the right amount of time.
I’ll never forget when my younger son (the one who was a newborn during Sandy Hook) told me that his kindergarten teacher told them that there were racoons loose in the school sometimes, so they needed to learn how to hide from them. I didn’t know what he was talking about until I figured out that the racoon was a euphemism for an active shooter. Because, of course, it was too traumatic to tell 5-year-olds that they needed to learn to hide from people who want to come into schools and harm them.
For years, I put my kids on the school bus, knowing that school wasn’t really the safe place I had hoped it was — that every day I was taking a risk that their school would end up the next one to make headlines.
Then, just over a week ago, it happened again
When I heard the news from Uvalde, Texas, my heart was in my throat again. I was making dinner and I had to just stop what I was doing and sob. Again, I pictured my own child among the dead, but this time it was my younger son, who was now a fourth-grader, just like the children killed at Robb Elementary School.
It hit me during all this that it had been almost a decade since Sandy Hook. My children had grown. My kindergartener is now in high school, just like the children from Sandy Hook would be — if they were still alive.
This tragedy hit me in a different way, because this time, I wasn’t sure that anything would change
If we did nothing after Sandy Hook, why would we do something now?
I hope I’m wrong. I hope now people will wake up and say, “Well, now this is really enough.” I hope lawmakers can get it together to pass common sense gun legislation. But I’m not holding my breath.
Most of all, I’m just grieving
I don’t understand how anyone could harm an innocent child. It’s unfathomable. I also don’t understand how anyone would not do everything in their power to stop this from ever happening again.
I don’t have answers. I just have what I know. As a mom who has been a witness to the unthinkable more times than I wish were true, I am just so furious, heartbroken, and sad. I don’t want my children to continue to grow up in a world like this. I don’t want one more child to be harmed this way.
It’s just not acceptable.
