Originally published on Medium.
It was a Wednesday. I was a high school junior, not yet 17.
Throughout the day, I found myself glancing behind me, mentally noting how I could get out of any of my classrooms should the threat arise. At 16, I taught myself situational awareness because just 24 hours before, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had murdered 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves at Columbine High School.
I was one of the class of 2000: the quintessential millennial, forever invincible — or so I believed until April 20, 1999.
My high school graduation, June 2000
This past May, I turned 40.
I’ve lived more than half my life since my junior year of high school and yet we are still talking about children being murdered in their school classrooms, as though nothing has changed in the nearly quarter of a century that’s passed since Columbine.
Because nothing. Has. Changed.
I heard about the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas at the end of the work day. My mind was elsewhere that Tuesday, thinking about dinner prep and my son’s Little League game. The breaking news alert popped up on my phone, like too many times before. The words “elementary school” stuck out to me, as if my brain couldn’t compute those two words in such close proximity to “shooting.”
Didn’t we do this before? Wasn’t it all supposed to end after Sandy Hook?
As I got my nine-year-old son out the door, I told him what happened without hesitation.
“Another shooting?” he said, in disbelief.
I nodded grimly, checking the rearview mirror as I pulled out from our driveway. “Yup, another school shooting.”
“Why do they keep happening?”
“I don’t know,” I said, unsure of to whom I was really saying that aloud.
My son, age 3
Shortly after my son turned three, a homophobic terrorist shot and killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. An avid public radio listener, I never thought my son was paying attention to the radio when I was tuned in to my local station.
“Mommy, what are they talking about on the news?” he piped up from the back seat, as a report about the Orlando shooting played.
“Over the weekend, something very sad happened where a lot of people got very hurt,” I replied as gently as I could. I knew it wouldn’t be his only question. My son has always been inquisitive, and that car ride was no different. I answered his questions as age-appropriately as I could.
“Mommy, are you sad?” my son asked me, always sensitive to the feelings of others.
“Yes, honey,” I said. “A lot of people are sad right now about it. It’s a very sad thing.”
“Mama, don’t be sad.”
My three-year-old, ever the astute listener, thankfully didn’t pick up on some of the words he heard in that afternoon news broadcast — words like “shooting” or “shooter.” I was grateful he didn’t ask me, “Mom, what’s a shooting?”
Because I knew one day, he inevitably would.
March for Our Lives rally, Boston Common (March 24, 2018)
“CHEESE NOT GUNS”
My son came up with that slogan. “Can’t argue with that, buddy!” I said as I wrote the letters in pencil on a piece of poster-board. I was impressed at how well my son traced the faint pencil lines of each letter. We were getting ready for the March for Our Lives rally on Boston Common. A month before, while my son was still in preschool, a teenaged gunman shot and murdered 14 students, two staff, and one teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
As we stood on the Boston Common in the brisk late-March cold, my son’s cheeks and nose were bright red. I should have brought him a hat, I thought, as my husband lifted him up to see the stage.
“Enough is enough! Enough is enough!” My son soon joined the chanting, his high-pitched little kid voice fully articulating each syllable: “eeNUFF is eeNUFF!”
My son, age 5
“Today we practiced a safety drill!” my son shared excitedly, after kindergarten one October afternoon. “We learned what to do if a lion gets loose in the school.”
I was caught off guard by that second part. I had seen the parade of students down our street midday, and I knew they were practicing how to evacuate the school in an emergency. Only when my son mentioned the “loose lion” did I finally put it all together.
They were practicing an active shooter drill. In kindergarten.
I felt my chest tighten. It’s started, I thought. There’s no going back now. I knew then that my son’s education would forever be tainted by the knowledge that there are people who mean to do him harm and that neither his teachers nor his parents could ever fully guarantee his safety on school grounds.
It’s too soon, I thought.
And then I remembered the conversation we’d had about Orlando only a year prior. And the March for Our Lives rally only six months before.
It was never a matter of “if”—it was always “when.”
My son, age 9
“Judah,” I said, as I parked next to the Little League fields.
“Yeah mom?”
“I want you to take a second to realize how lucky you are, to be playing a Little League game with your friends right now. Because I know I’m incredibly lucky to be your mom, and to be here to see your game tonight.”
“I know, mom,” he said.
“Because there are 21 families that aren’t as lucky as we are tonight Judah, and my heart is breaking for them.”
“I know, mom,” my son replied, his voice heavy with sudden maturity.
As I watched him cross the street, baseball bag slung over his shoulder, one pant leg hiked up, the other down, I couldn’t help but think about all the lost baseball games, the lost birthdays, the lost graduations and weddings — all these beautiful, precious moments robbed forever from these 21 families in Uvalde, Texas.
And the thousands more families since Columbine.
My son has now lived longer than the two oldest student victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. My son gets to play baseball and have sleepovers and go to summer camps. Daniel Barden and Josephine Gay, who were shot dead at age seven, will never get to do those things again, if they ever got to do them at all.
In the 24 years since Columbine, “more than 311,000 students have experienced gun violence at school” according to The Washington Post.
I don’t think I can ever answer my son’s question: “Why does this keep happening, mom?”
I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.
But what I do know is that they can’t continue: not for my sake—but for his. Our country must end the relentless and senseless gun violence that is endemic in our schools. Thoughts and prayers do nothing. The time for policy and change is almost 25 years overdue. No more children should have to die for this nation to pass common sense gun legislation.
Uvalde: we stand with you — in solidarity, in grief, in rage, in despair — and in action.
But will our leaders stand with us, once and for all? (I’m not encouraged by their inaction on gun reform so far.) How many more families have to bury their babies before our country’s leaders take substantive, transformative action? How many Columbines, Sandy Hooks, Parklands, and Uvaldes will it take?
The most formative years of my life were shaped and defined by school shootings. I refuse to let the same be true for my son.