#Enough
This is not how tonight was supposed to be.
Tomorrow, I send my youngest child off to her first day of senior year. Her very last day in which I may (or may not) be able to take the requisite first day of school photo, and give her all my wishes for the best year.
I should be having all the feelings that parents have the night before the first day of senior year: That mix of melancholy and joy, nostalgia and hope, the cliches about the days being long and the years being short. I should be wishing for an abundance of friends who have her back, a good part in the play, and maybe — if she chooses — a date to the prom who knows he’s the luckiest guy in the room.
I should be anxious (just a little) about her grades, her courseload, that dreaded college essay.
Instead all I can think about is the guns.
This is the year more of our kids are going back to school, by popular demand, with their smartphones handed to teachers or placed in an unreachable lockbox somewhere.
This is the day I’m reading texts from children at Apalachee High School writing their mothers:
school shooting rn
im scared
pls
someone’s dead
Mothers responding that they are dropping everything, leaving work, running to school right this second and I love you so much be safe. I’m coming. I’m coming, baby.
Because that’s what we do for our children.
We run toward the danger.
We memorize our kids’ clothing each morning, should we ever need to provide a description.
We tell our kids we love them as we hug them goodbye, but never that we’re worried about them. We don’t want them to know we’re scared, because we don’t want them to live scared.
We don’t expect life to be perfect for them, but is it too much to hope that the failures and stumbles and heartaches will be the normal ones? Is it too much to ask for a mere unrequited crush? A totally unfair F on a test? A crappy school lunch? That one mean teacher?
Their struggles should not include memories of huddling with friends under desks in a lockdown. They should not fear hearing screams in the hall of a classmate being murdered with only a 1 ⅜-inch wide door to separate them.
And we — the parents, the grandparents, the caregivers — we should never have to text I love you, in case we don’t get the chance to say it one more time in person.
It’s the guns.
The fucking guns.
Moms Demand Action is fighting successfully for common sense safety measures to protect people from unwanted gun violence. Donate by September 5, and Mike Bloomberg will match it.
My husband got back from two weeks away last night, very late. Today he took a rare day off and when I announced some errands I was going to go run, he offered to come with and take me to lunch. We heard about Apalachee about 20 minutes after we left the house.
Apalachee is about 40 minutes from here.
Apalachee is the school my kids’ beloved, life-changing band teacher moved on to after my kids’ school.
And so I spent the entirety of this rare “date” time with my husband glued to my phone, reaching out to anyone and everyone who I thought might know if our friend was safe. And of course no one knew anything, and the rumors were flying, and meanwhile all I could think was “I have to make sure he’s okay before I let the kids know what’s happened.” (One kid is now out of state, and it was early enough that the news wasn’t yet national. The other kid was at work and unlikely to hear.)
After what felt like the longest hour of my life, we found out that our loved one was alive and uninjured. (I started to type “unharmed” but that can’t possibly be true, right?) And then I exhaled and texted the kids. But I’m still heartbroken and furious and SO DAMN TIRED of our governor and GOP legislators insisting it’s not the guns. IT’S THE GODDAMN GUNS, Y’ALL.
The shooter in custody is 14 years old. Maybe—hear me out—just MAYBE we should have a country where angry children can’t simply grab a weapon of mass destruction and pretend their school is Call of Duty. Maybe the rep for the district where this happened should stop bragging that he’ll never vote in favor of red flag laws. Maybe the party of “all life is sacred” should actually act like they believe it.
It's. The. Fucking. Guns.