I am struggling. 

This week I found myself crying in the car during my commute, and crying in my breaks in the Mother’s Room, and crying holding Dave’s hand in the dark before we fell asleep.

I have said hello with a smile to the teachers at daycare, and made small talk with my coworkers about weekend plans, and I let everyone merge at their convenience in traffic. I suspect that, like me, most people are just going through the motions right now, so I’m trying to be extra gentle.

But I am struggling. 

After the Uvalde shooting, our superintendent sent a reminder about the many systems and procedures put in place at our schools. Our daycare ran an emergency lockdown drill the following day utilizing the advanced security tech they invested in 2 years ago. They mean to reassure us that they are doing everything in their power to protect our kids. I can’t finish reading the emails knowing the “reassuring” measures put in place in Uvalde failed.

My 6 year old’s kindergarten teacher can’t be more than 30. She tracks my son’s “whole body listening” with a “smile chart” that he is proud to show us at the end of every school day. She has poker straight blonde hair and a deceptively commanding presence. She has children of her own; her eldest son is in 1st grade. I find myself praying she would be willing to shield my son to save his life. And then I feel sick for having the thought.

My 4 year old panics under pressure. In the event that there is imminent danger and he is asked to quickly follow instructions, I have little faith he could do it. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that this – this trait that usually manifests as frustration when I ask him to hurry and finish his toast in the morning and he looks up at me and stops chewing entirely – could be a life-threatening flaw.

My 2 year old spent Thursday practicing both how to use the potty and how to behave in the event an active shooter is in the building. This sentence does not – cannot – make sense.

My 10 month old isn’t quite crawling yet and I am painfully aware that there are three windows into his classroom.

I have a moment of gratitude that some psychological coping mechanism disallows me from completing these trains of thought.

It’s not that this is about me, or my children, or the school environment exclusively, or the fact that the odds are in any one individual’s favor such that this nightmare will never become their reality. But for me, this latest act of incomprehensible violence creates an overwhelming mix of emotions, none of which feel actionable.

I feel survivor’s guilt, because my children are effectively no different than the children who died, but my children are still living and there’s no particular reason why it was Uvalde and not my own community this time. I feel dread, because other school shootings are often followed by a rash of similar threats and school shut-downs. I feel hot, ugly rage, at anyone and everyone who is willing to reject the notion of demanding improved gun control measures because of politics and grossly warped rationalizations that cause the country to stalemate on any material change while the rest of the world looks on sadly with so many of their proven policies that prevent exactly these tragedies. And I feel hopelessness, because the atrocity of the Uvalde shooting is not even a new – or record – low; we learned years ago that nowhere is safe and no part of our population is sacred and we will do nothing to address the core cause and therefore it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.

I spoke with some colleagues at work who have kids that are in middle and high school. We talked about strategies for managing the message appropriately based on different age ranges. I listened closely to how they communicated with their kids. One woman’s 7th grade daughter has been seeing a therapist since the nearby Oxford High School shooting in 2021 to help her cope, and she wrung the sleeves of her sweater anxiously when she lamented to us that she can’t stop her daughter seeing the faces of the slain children on the internet and falling into a dark place again. One woman’s 9th grade son asked her, frustrated, “how do we fix this?” Not only did she not have an answer for him, but none of us in the room did, either.

This conversation was the first time that I really internalized the fact that there is no way out of this reality for my children, with 18 years ahead of us yet in the K-12 system. Right now they conduct their ALICE drills and think little more of it than they do tornado or fire drills. But one day they will learn what the trained responses are meant to protect them from. I would wear the burden of that knowledge a thousand times over if it meant they could stay ignorant forever, but they can’t, and they won’t. Just like my colleagues, I will have those conversations with my own children, and I will choose my words carefully in the hopes that my sons heed the importance of the preventative measures, but retain a sense of safety and trust at their school. I will hope upon all hopes that the worst they experience is the sad resignation of normalcy that this is a risk adults have decided they must live with but that it never reaches them. 

I don’t want to give up on the possibility of change. I see the calls to action and I am so thankful for activists that carry the torch while people like me stop reading the news and cry in our closets. And I do make phone calls and write emails and donate and sign petitions and I vote. But I’ve done this all before, and so it feels like another way I am just going through the motions.

Because I think the hardest part about this – the reason why I am struggling the most – is that I have no reason to believe this will stop. It may not be my own children, but it will be someone’s children.

When I put this into writing, I desperately want to be wrong.

I am struggling.

***

I wrote this as a way to process things. I wasn’t certain I would post it given how vulnerable it makes me feel. I decided to share in order to document this heartbreaking moment of my parenting journey just as I often document the joyful moments. It will feel clunky and challenging for me to share happier moments ahead, but it would feel too callous and disingenuous to not confront the pain at all.

One of my favorite writers wrote a really moving piece on the subject here. I suggest the full read if you are emotionally up to it, particularly because it does include a few resources around ways to turn anguish into action.