There Was a Shooting at My High School; Can I Keep My Kids Safe Anymore?

It is enough. I have had it. I had thought this year would be better. I tried to will it. I tried to convince myself with my resolutions during that first week in January. I typed my goals up in a neat little list. I was specific. Looked at it each morning.

My goals focused primarily on being a good person. On prioritizing spending time with the people I love and the people I am responsible for. My goals focused on seeking the good while I feel there is a foot in a heavy boot on the center of my back, while my heart palpitates, while my eyes stay red, while the winter worsens.

My highest priority is my family, my friends, and my community. My greatest joy is spending time with those I love. I will prioritize this time.

I really wrote that. I meant it, I still do. I think we should be clear and unapologetic about what we want, and also, I am too old to care if you think it’s lame that I set intentions.

Then, the shootings started. Or maybe, they continued. I’m not sure. The violence worsened. It felt ever-present. A dead mother in Minneapolis. A dead nurse. A child detained, shipped away from home and back. People treated like animals. No, worse, people treated like their lives mean nothing, and then, for the most unlucky, their lives gone. It became easy to picture violence anywhere, the masked men on any corner, even my own. My neighbors handed out whistles and I placed ours under the TV with books until it became lost in the endless piles of things in our small home.

It was a Monday night and that was all happening in our country when I got a text from my best friend about a shooting at our high school that afternoon.

I have two young children; my daughter is six, and my son is three.

I don’t know if I can keep my children safe anymore.

I quickly Googled it. It wasn’t a Columbine or a Sandy Hook or a Uvalde. My town’s name would not be remembered for this. One student shot, another in custody. It did not even make the news where I live in Brooklyn. Not a big enough act of violence for national news. Which is likely true, but I still find it disgusting.

I like to tell myself that these things don’t happen in places where I’m from or where I live. But they did, they do, it happened.

My hometown, Rockville, Maryland, is all green lawns and professional parents and good schools and Ivy League admissions, our lovely little town, our Blue Ribbon school. There was a swim club in our neighborhood that I went to every day in the summer with all the other kids from the neighborhood. The roads between my house and the high school were quaint and residential with oaks and pines and the occasional supermarket or fast-casual restaurant.

Which is all to say that this is both shocking and not at all. Violence is everywhere and guns are everywhere and I don’t know if I can keep my children safe anymore.

As the pictures from the shooting came out, my high school looked unchanged from when I left it 20 years before. I kissed boys in the parking lot where now there were ambulances.

I danced in the school play, the auditorium declaring our namesake in massive exterior letters, now featured at the top of each article. I was reprimanded in these halls (countless times) for outfits that were too revealing.

What I’m trying to say is I can picture this shooting. Where I would have hidden. The halls the terrified teenagers dashed down and the doors that were locked and, I’m sure, barricaded.

An acquaintance posted on Facebook about her niece being on lockdown until 8:15 p.m., the kids peeing in trash cans or holding it in.

If my kids were trapped in that building, I would throw myself at the door. I would defy the barricades; I would claw my way in and lie on top of their bodies.

I haven’t lived in Maryland for over half of my life now, but when you experience your formative years somewhere, it is, in some ways, always a little bit home, no matter how hard you try to leave.

I think of my own children at their school. After Uvalde, I obsessed about the lock on my daughter’s classroom door. I wondered about the impossible training the staff must do. She was three at the time, and I hated that her classroom door was so close to the front of the school. Why did they put the smallest children towards the front of the school? It made the littlest ones vulnerable, and at the time, she did not know how to run.

Now, my son is three and in that same classroom. He is a boy so full of energy, he literally bounces off the walls from the moment he wakes until the moment he falls asleep, always too late and in our arms, wearing a ridiculous and adorable PJ set from someone who loves him very much.

I am, once again, worried that his classroom is so close to the front door of the school. He should be upstairs, he should be in the back of the building, he should be in a school that is not a school but that is just a place where 3-year-old boys can be safe and play, which is no longer a school, but also cannot permanently be my arms.

So here I am apart from my children while they are at school. They are defenseless. They are small. I think about how my son cannot physically sit still or be quiet or protect himself. I wonder what this world is capable of. I think of my daughter’s first-grade classroom, toward the back of the building, and how she is also constantly in motion. She is a gymnast and she tumbles and bends her body and sits in her splits relentlessly.

Look at how they move, I think. They are so bright. I want to protect them. I want to be a good person and a good mother and keep them safe. I don’t ever want harm to come their way.

These things did not used to happen. These things should not happen.

But I don’t know if I can keep my children safe anymore.

Each morning, my son crawls into my bed and asks me, Is it morning? He is trying to make sense of the light and the time and his place in it all. I always respond, It’s not morning yet. Let me hold you for a minute, and then I wrap my arms around his tiny body while he sucks his thumb and sighs.