When my eldest attends his first day of preschool at the local Montessori, I cry harder than he does. He is four going on twenty-four, and I am a thirty-two year old puddle in the shape of a woman. We do this for days. Eventually, we all accept that he will leave the house in the morning, I will cry, and shortly thereafter, everyone will move into a new sense of normalcy. He will make friends and learn new things. We will have room to breathe. The tears will become less and less as the days go by. Routine sets in.

A few weeks into our new normal, Atticus comes home, and with the sweetest voice you can imagine, says to me, from the back seat of the car, “mama, someone brought a gun to school today.” I slam on the brakes, almost giving myself whiplash.

I turn the car around and drive back to the tiny one room school, exactly the model Montessori imagined. It is an idyllic and quaint yellow building, a first step into the world, replete with a playhouse, a kitchen, a garden. I huff into the classroom to confront Teacher Tom, whose countenance is serene and unflappable. “Atticus said that someone brought a gun to school today. Why haven’t we heard anything about this?” Tom looks at me with a bemused grin, and brings both hands out of his pockets, pointing each forefinger at me with his thumb and middle fingers in a circle. Wink, wink. “Ah, yes, someone brought finger guns to school, and those are not allowed.”

Orcas is an idyllic place, and I joke that it has two seasons - parade season and power outage season. In the warmer months you can’t go into town on a Saturday without hitting a parade (see: Earth Day parade, Solstice parade, 4th of July parade, pet parade, Graduation parade, St. Patrick’s Day parade … I’m surely missing a few). Our mayor elect is an animal, usually a dog, but some years we branch out and elect an amphibian or, once, a whale (ok, fine, here). When people ask me what it’s like to live here, I always say, “it’s such a safe place to raise your kids.” And mostly, this is true. My kids ride their bikes into town, they walk to the corner gas station, they meet their friends at the beach, or the lake, or the basketball court. The Great Big World doesn’t visit us often, but sometimes I gently remind my children that the world is everywhere, and it’s good to remember that we are in it. I say, “Orcas is a place full of people, and though we don’t want to think about it, people are the same wherever you go.”

I moved to the island in 2012, two small kids in tow - my ex-husband spent summers here as a teenager, and I come in blind but know that getting out of the city will be good for my brain. Parenting kicked up a sense of paranoia in me that hadn’t presented itself in years. When you learn the world is unsafe from an early age (I wrote about it here), you learn to sacrifice yourself to everything. But - my children. You can’t offer them to the world in this same way. I want to keep them close to me and hold them in my arms, I want to wipe their tears forever. But that is not how life works, or children grow. I wrote this a few years ago for them, and I’ve shared it before, but I feel it now, thinking about them small in my arms. How we wept over the injustices that life had prepared for them, our tears the same as every parent who watches a child walk through their doorway into the one that houses the rest of the world.

Baby Teeth

When you were little, I prayed for you

Bent my body and mind towards 

What I didn’t know and begged the 

Universe for your safe

passage through this world, begged for

Fewer tears and love as large as

Mountains.

When you were little, I asked all the

Gods, I said, this child is mine, but

how will I ever let go?

How will I hand you over to this place

With its ugliness and fear

How will I offer you up to the

Heavens knowing that your

Heart will break and your

Bones might, too

How will I wave goodbye at

The bus stop or when you leave

For university.

There was no answer.

When you were little, I prayed for you

I asked the things I didn’t believe

To meet me in the middle

Just in case, I pleaded for clemency, 

That the sins of your parents 

Wouldn’t follow you down 

The dark streets of your life

And darling, no one ever answered

But you turned to me and smiled.

_____________________________________________

I’m drinking green tea on the couch when I get the text from my ex-husband. My kids are at his house this week, so when I start reading, “Miette will reach out to you regarding a threat at the school today… I authorized her to leave and go home with her friend…” my stomach finds its way up to my throat, and my fingers can’t move fast enough in typing out the “call me” response. In a moment he is calmly dissecting the events of the morning. I haven’t checked my email yet, so haven’t seen the message from the school about the incident earlier. I’m now trying to listen to him while skimming this email simultaneously. The email and the story I’m hearing don’t add up.

The story, at least in the beginning, is that a seventh grader (who has a history of talking about shooting up the school and has made some specific threats to other kids) has revealed a gun in a snapchat conversation. It snowballs from there. The kids have buzzed around each other and created a narrative of fear that is entirely understandable; it is both exponential in nature and origami matter. By the time they are thirty minutes into this Friday, the rumor is that there is a ‘kill list.’ My child hears she is on the list. The story doesn’t just have legs, it runs rings. Fear knows to run or to freeze, but it seems it also plays telephone.

When I speak with her after hanging up with her dad, she is calm in a way I know all too well. Harnessing the quiet outwardly to try to still the inward waters. It’s something I see in myself and it breaks my heart to know that she is learning how to mask her fear from the rest of the world. I suppose it’s what we do. We hide our inner turmoils as acts of self-preservation and survival.

I do the only things that make sense. I dress myself. I drive to the school. I drive to the sheriff’s station. I drive to hug my daughter. I speak to everyone, more than once. Slowly, the real story forms. It is not mine to tell, and I feel full of empathy and compassion for every single one of these kids who is involved. The kid who will have this at his back the rest of the time he attends this school. The kid who set the rumor mill in motion, (for what?). The kids who thought they were on a list, and had to walk down that road, imagined or not. It breaks my heart that the gun entered the middle school, even though it was only the idea of the gun.

It is sobering to wander into these conversations of conjecture. At the school they say, “the last time the police had to be called for an emergency, they showed up in two minutes.” I think, a lot can happen in two minutes. The deputy I’m speaking with says to me a minimum of five times, “I will do everything in my power to keep your kids safe, but I can’t promise anything.” I sit in my car and let this come to me over and over again. My kids are safe, and I am grateful for all the people at the school who care deeply to make it so, but I am murderous, and I get stuck in my memories as I try to gather myself to move on with the day. “I will do everything in my power to keep your kids safe, but I can’t promise anything.”

(her hair, golden in the light of the sun coming through the window in the living room, her smile when I come around the corner, accentuated by her dimples. Her laugh)

“I will do everything in my power to keep your kids safe, but I can’t promise anything.”

(her, in my arms the first night of her life, when her dad left us alone in the hospital to take care of her brother, sick with a fever. How we were up all night, her silent and content, me, amazed at her readiness to live. How I kissed her tiny forehead, whispering, “it’s just you and me, kid.”)

“I will do everything in my power to keep your kids safe, but I can’t promise anything.”

(my son, aged three, running through an orchard, curls like a cherub and the sweetest grin you’ve ever seen, turning his head back to me and shouting, “mama, look!” as a deer wanders across the lawn in front of him)

“I will do everything in my power to keep your kids safe, but I can’t promise anything.”

My jaw clenches, I think, why not.

_________________________________________________

Since 1966 there have been 804 victims, and 2,221 wounded in 2,699 gun incidents in schools. As of November 11th of this year, there have been 76 school shootings in the US. Seventy-six. 2022 set the “record” for deadliest year yet, with 46 fatalities. Not to mention that guns remain the leading cause of death for children aged one to nineteen in the states. If you want to get pretty depressed about it, this site exists: but maybe don't click this.

One of my favorite contemporary American poets, Matthew Olzmann, wrote the following poem that I have read a handful of times over the last few months.

Letter with Two Lines Beginning by Czeslaw Milosz

You whom I could not save,

Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar

backpacks shouldn’t be needed

for children walking to school?

Those same children

also shouldn’t require a suit

of armor when standing

on their front lawns, or snipers

to watch their backs

as they eat at McDonalds.

They shouldn’t have to stop

to consider the speed

of a bullet or how it might

reshape their bodies. But

one winter, back in Detroit,

I had one student

who opened a door and died.

It was the front

door of his house, but

it could have been any door,

and the bullet could have written

any name. The shooter

was thirteen years old

and was aiming

at someone else. But

a bullet doesn’t care

about “aim,” it doesn’t

distinguish between

the innocent and the innocent,

and how was the bullet

supposed to know this

child would open the door

at the exact wrong moment

because his friend

was outside and screaming

for help. Did I say

I had “one” student who

opened a door and died?

That’s wrong.

There were many.

The classroom of grief

had far more seats

than the classroom for math

though every student

in the classroom for math

could count the names

of the dead.

A kid opens a door. The bullet

couldn’t possibly know,

nor could the gun, because

“guns don’t kill people,” they don’t

have minds to decide

such things, they don’t choose

or have a conscience,

and when a man doesn’t

have a conscience, we call him

a psychopath. This is how

we know what type of assault rifle

a man can be,

and how we discover

the hell that thrums inside

each of them. Today,

there’s another

shooting with dead

kids everywhere. It was a school,

a movie theater, a parking lot.

The world

is full of doors.

And you, whom I cannot save,

you may open a door

and enter

a meadow or a eulogy.

And if the latter, you will be

mourned, then buried

in rhetoric.

There will be

monuments of legislation,

little flowers made

from red tape.

What should we do? we’ll ask

again. The earth will close

like a door above you.

What should we do?

And that click you hear?

That’s just our voices,

the deadbolt of discourse

sliding into place.

—————————————————————————

With all the eloquence I can muster, this is what I want to say.

Fuck this shit.

Fuck the second amendment.

Fuck the lack of mental health care in this country.

Fuck. This.

What should we do? I don’t know, but we should do it.