Gratitude and Grief

My son turned fifteen today. 

I've told his birth story so many times, even in this space. Today in the car, driving home from bowling, I reminded the kids that fifteen years ago I spent the day cuddling Isaac on the couch in our family room. I was blessed with an intense but mercifully quick and uncomplicated labor, and two hours after he was born we bundled him into his carseat and drove home from the birth center. The winter morning was frosty and still dark, but I felt nothing but buoyant joy.

I was also starving, so Matt bought me a breakfast burrito in the McDonald's drive-thru on the way home. Orange juice too, I think. Like the grilled cheese I devoured immediately after Suzannah's birth, it was the best thing I'd ever tasted.

We arrived home just after Suzannah's auntie Morgan had fed her waffles for breakfast. We'd planned to introduce her to her new brother but take her to daycare for a few hours to let us settle in and keep a normal routine for her for a little longer. She only had two more weeks of daycare before she'd be home full-time with me until the following September. But as luck would have it, Matt wound up taking her to the pediatrician around lunchtime; she'd spiked a fever and had a runny nose and cough. Today we laughed about Matt announcing to our pediatrician that oh, by the way, we'd also had a baby that morning.

I asked Matt to bring home a quarter pounder for lunch, so back to McDonald's he went. This might not be such a grand memory, except that it makes all of us laugh.

I was a more seasoned mama the second time around, and I had my own bed, my own couch. Isaac had no trouble nursing from birth, and my memories of that day are cozy despite the sleep deprivation. My doula called later that afternoon to gently encourage me to nap, but I couldn't take my eyes off my son. I didn't sleep until that night, with my baby nestled next to me in bed. It was a perfect day.

*

This morning Isaac and I walked the dog together in light drizzle, and then we all went to lunch at the Spar before heading to Tower Lanes. We didn't check the schedule ahead of time, so when we learned that bowling wouldn't open until 2:30 due to a tournament, we booked a reservation at a much smaller bowling alley in a neighborhood we love. The kids played in the arcade for awhile first, gleefully redeemed their tickets for handfuls of trash, and then we headed to our next destination. All four Winslows were on our game. I mean, by our third, we were on fire. Each one of us bowled strikes and spares like nobody's business. Listen, I broke 100. That doesn't happen a lot.

After bowling, we stopped for coffee -- well, a cortado for me and an espresso for Matt, and baked goods for the kids. Without any prompting, they both shared theirs with each other and then offered us bites as well. Back home, Matt diced an onion for me -- he likes to help with dinner prep -- and Isaac asked if I wanted to play Blokus, the game we played nearly every morning back in 2020 when schools shut down and which he almost always refuses to play with me now because apparently I "overdid it." (Please.)

Isaac takes after me in that he is a total homebody; he'd almost always rather stay home than go out. It made sense, then, that he requested a night in for his birthday rather than a favorite restaurant meal, even though Saturday night is our usual family dinner night out. He wanted tater tot casserole and homemade cake, and this little thing is so endearing to me. So Matt baked the cake and made the ganache frosting, and I made the tater tot casserole. (Not Tim Walz's recipe, though; I made that on election night and I can never eat it again. It was delicious in the moment, though very heavy -- he uses bratwursts instead of ground beef -- and when I understood how the night was going to go it was all I could do not to throw up. All night long, I regretted the Election Casserole. For Isaac, I chose a simpler version -- ground beef and green beans, plus the cheesy goodness of freshly shredded cheddar topped with tater tots. We served it with a green salad.) He opened his gifts after dinner but before cake, and he was sweetly appreciative of everything, as he always is.

*

Here is a thing that is always part of Isaac's birth story: His name means "He laughs." I couldn't have known then how much my second-born child would make me laugh every single day of his life, no matter how dark the day.

*

Here is a thing that is impossible to untangle from my son's birthday: on the day he turned three, my lunch break was interrupted by the sound of a colleague's screams.

"They killed all the kids," she cried.

On the day my son turned three, twenty first graders were slaughtered in their classroom in a public elementary school in the United States of America. On the day I was excited to celebrate my son, I swallowed back my terror and tears for my last class of the day, and as soon as the bell rang I rushed to pick up my own first grader from her classroom in a public elementary school in the United States of America.

I have written about this and written about this and written about this and it feels like screaming in a locked, empty room. Parkland: 17 dead in 2018.  Uvalde: 19 children killed in 2022. And all the others, too many for me to remember by name on demand, even though I've tried to write about them, tried to donate money every time another one happens. This is shameful, that there are too many to recall, to name. The fact that my country excels in mass shootings is a shame that should be named.

The year my son turned three, the year twenty children were slaughtered in their school, President Obama wept and Republicans openly mocked his tears. This year my son turns fifteen, and we have elected people into the highest offices who shrug their shoulders and say that school shootings are merely a "fact of life."

I think of those twenty children from Sandy Hook every year on this day. I think about how they should be home from their first quarter of college right now, or working at their first post high-school jobs. They should be hauling home laundry bags, sleeping in, catching up with high school friends.

Their parents should be able to hug them hard after missing them for months.

The blood of these babies coated the floor and it continues to coat our hands.

*

It's hard to have hope in this country, in a country that reelected an unapologetic racist, a misogynist, a rapist, a monster. In a country where folks think they deserve absolution if they didn't vote for him but voted for those in their cities and states who will uphold his monstrous agenda. We are a spectacle and a shame. But as Rebecca Solnit often reminds us, hope is not the same thing as optimism. Hope requires work, not complacency. Hope means we acknowledge that things are very, very bad and they will get worse. But Solnit also reminds us that we can build paradises and sanctuaries in hell. For that is where we are.

*

I write all of this from a place of relative safety and extreme privilege. I know this. And I write from a place of hope, because my children deserve this. My daughter deserves our protection and my son deserves our accountability. My son has been granted every privilege, and I know that raising him to understand this requires work beyond raising him to be "good." Because "good" white straight Christian men have caused immeasurable harm when they haven't been taught to interrogate that privilege. Even the progressive ones, even the kind ones. And we've devoted too much energy to their hurt feelings at the expense of people's lives.

*

I am aware, every day, of the darkness. But do not underestimate my capacity to embrace joy.

It has been a dark, hard year. Personally, professionally, locally, globally.

I am aware, every day, of my privilege. This year has knocked my sideways in ways experienced by lots of folks with fewer supports and resources. What I know I need to do is channel that privilege into action, with the energy I am privileged to have because I've had supports and resources. It's the most important work we can do, and I'm still learning it. I believe this is our collective responsibility. To interrogate this privilege and act on it. And to listen. To listen.

My children's birthdays make me contemplative, I guess. The personal becomes political. 

*

We can build paradises and sanctuaries in hell.

*

I wrote this five years ago: Every year, and especially every December, the darkest month of the year, I look at my son, at both of my children, and remember the light.

So this is my prayer, every December: Let me never take such ordinary gifts for granted. Let me find a way to use my gratitude, and my grief. Let me not drop anchor at despair.

The Day After

Tomorrow, the day after 19 children were murdered in an elementary school on a Tuesday afternoon in May, I will walk into my classroom knowing that what I had planned is irrelevant. 

I don't know how many times we've had to do this -- walk into a classroom after a mass shooting and fumble our way through. No, literally, I have no idea how many times. Too many. 

All over social media, folks are asking this absurd question: How many children have to be murdered before we do something? It's absurd because we already know that there is no number. If twenty children weren't enough in 2012, twenty aren't enough ten years later, with all the murdered children before and in between. 

The question is absurd, because this isn't something that randomly continues to happen to us. America has chosen this. It is our horror and our shame, and there is no bottom to it.

This will be my nineteenth post specifically tagged with "Guns in America." Nineteen children, so far. The number keeps climbing. 

Tomorrow, I will go to school and grapple with what it means to be a teacher and love students in a country that does not value our lives. Just like every other teacher in America. We're not okay.

This afternoon I texted back and forth with one of my beloved 2018 babies, who was my student and TA during her senior year when seventeen people were murdered at school in Parkland, Florida. Our school building back in 2018 was a nightmare to secure -- so many points of entry, so many unlocked doors -- but at the same time, my classroom had two doors. I knew we could run out one and be outside; the other would take us into an inner room that led to other classrooms, other spaces to hide, other spaces to escape through.

Rachel remembers thinking that she'd run to my room or to the science room, because there were more of those back rooms.

"I imagined every scenario," she said. "How fucked up is that?"

But I did, too. All the time. I remember a sophomore asking me, "What would we do?" And I told them. We talked through how we'd get out, where they'd run, where they'd hide if they couldn't run.

I've posted this conversation before. It went like this:

"But what do you do?"

"I do my damndest to make sure he doesn't get to you."

"You just stay and get shot? That's messed up. We'd stay with you."

"No. You don't."

Look, I'm pretty fucking pissed that's part of the job description, too. But it is. It just is.

Anyway.

Tomorrow I'm going to school the day after a mass shooting where nineteen more babies were slaughtered at school in America. Tomorrow I'm going to go to school and teach in a country that keeps choosing this. And I'm going to talk about it with my kids, because they'll want to. I know them that well by now. My fifth period is going to have a lot of feelings and a lot of questions, and I'll tell you right now that I don't give the remotest of shits that I've been directed to administer the district reading test.

Not long ago, one of them asked, "If we had to get out of this building, how would we even do it?" Our new school is a building ready for violence. In a lockdown, classroom doors lock automatically from the inside and hallway doors seal us inside our corridors. I suppose this should make me feel safe; instead it makes me feel trapped. We haven't actually even had a fire drill since October or something, and even that wasn't so much a drill as it was our too-sensitive smoke alarms tripping every time some kid vaped in a bathroom. When that happens now, they cancel the alarm and tell us all to stay in class. We have no idea what to do in a real emergency anymore. Last fall when we tried to evacuate our three-story building, everyone poured out one entrance, slowly, heading to the football field. I know where my daughter is during every period. Once, she was in weight training; the door was likely open already. Once, she was on the third floor, and my heart drummed madly in my chest. I don't think we even got everyone out of the building before those of us on the field were herded back in.

So I don't know that I'm going to have any answers for them, but I owe them the space to ask and to talk if they want it.

I'm a mama and a teacher and I exist in a perpetual state of terror and grief and rage and hopelessness. I'm grieving hard tonight. And the rage at our apathy and our inhumanity continues to build.

If you're not a teacher, know that we are not okay. Spare us platitudes and prayers without action. It might be possible for you to go to work tomorrow and carry on like normal, even if you're grieving, too (because I know so many of you are also working through terror, grief, and rage) but it's not possible for us. What that looks like in each classroom depends on what our kids need. But even if our kids need us to create a sense of normalcy tomorrow, please know that it's not normal, it's not okay, and so many of us still feel that we're going at this alone, in a deep, lonely darkness. And I just don't see that changing.

Could the world be about to turn?

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison

"As Lutheran Christians, our focus on Jesus Christ affects how this church understands justice. Because we are freed in Christ for others, we are able to respond to God’s call to love our neighbor as ourselves. In society, neighbor love takes the form of neighbor justice."
--From the proposed social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action" (adopted with 97% of the vote at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, August 2019)

This is a familiar scene for me: sitting down to write after a long day of travel, after a week away from home, after returning from a summer trip and feeling like I should be writing about its moments. The lake in Minnesota, and the way the evening light settled across the sky, lighting the water as I swam after dinner until dark. The way my son dove in as soon as we arrived last Saturday evening and for the next four days could only be coaxed from the water for meals. I should be writing about the completely wonderful and utterly necessary getaway with my best friend, who picked me up and spirited me away to Fargo/Moorhead, where we spent a couple of nearly perfect days visiting our college town for the first time in years. It was deeply good for my soul.

And yet, last summer, the night we returned from our first trip of the summer, this is what I wrote:

Underneath it all I have felt a relentless churning dread, a sickening shame over what our country is revealing itself to be. I sat upstairs while the kids played downstairs, listening to the sound of their laughter. I sat right down on the carpet and leaned against the bed and clutched my head and exchanged a few texts with friends who were also sitting somewhere clutching their heads, literally or figuratively. This has been a very, very bad news week. I'm just sick. I don't know where to start. We traumatize thousands of children. Children. Without apology or shame...

I could write exactly that and more tonight.

We had extra time at the airport yesterday after dropping off our rental car, and I finally had a few desperately needed moments to myself. I sat at a wine bar and ordered a turkey sandwich and a flight of white wine and wrote six pages in my journal. I was hardly even writing real sentences; I just poured the messy contents of my mind all over those pages. Migrant workers detained while their children were at school, children who waited in vain to be picked up, or children who went home to empty houses. Children who slept on a gymnasium floor. More shootings. Terrorism at the hands of toxic white men. Why don't we call it that? Why don't we say our country is under terrorist attack? Can we pause to imagine how differently this would play out -- the policy changes on the table -- if the dozens of people murdered in three different states had been murdered by someone other than a white man? How is it a fathomable thing that mass shooters invoke words used by the president literally hundreds of times?

So I slept terribly all week. But I slept terribly in safe, comfortable beds, simply because I happened to win the cosmic lottery of senseless privilege.

And then we have these absurd, obscene discussions. Thoughts and prayers. Mental health. I was stupid enough to read the comments on Steve Bullock's Facebook page. I like the governor of my home state quite a bit, but the trolling comments under literally every post on his page never fail to depress me: Tyranny of the government and "We have the right to access firearms with absolutely no restrictions!" And, of course, "But you don't care about the slaughter of innocent babies." That's about every third comment, including posts that show, for instance, a photograph of the governor eating corn on the cob at the state fair. At that point, I'm utterly reduced to for fuck's sake until I can rally enough to donate to immigration aid and gun control. Again.

The same story of America, in any season.

And then Toni Morrison died. And I just cannot. Cannot.

I've been trying to counter every horror I read about with a tribute to Toni Morrison. There is no shortage of either. All the great writers understand who was the greatest of the greats, the absolute brilliant best: Jesmyn Ward, Marlon James, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, John Irving, Angie Thomas, Margaret Atwood, Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, Carmen Maria Machado, Chigozie Obioma. And so very many others. I would bet all the money I have that if Pat Conroy were still alive he'd have written something gorgeous about her, too.

This is where I find hope this week. Or maybe not hope, because truth be told, most days I don't have a lot of hope that things will be much better than what they are in my lifetime. But something else, some unnameable feeling fueled by a fierce and consuming combination of rage and love. Who was it that said we are not obliged to finish the task, but neither may we abandon it? That's where I'm at. That's why I keep reading and writing and teaching. That simple human need to connect, only connect. To see something beautiful and true in the artistry of our daily lives, the beauty and truth captured by writers and artists, the thing I have to believe in to keep breathing in and out. The connectedness and not-aloneness, I suppose.

And then other things happened, while I tried to grapple with the juxtaposition of soul-nurturing vacation and the horror happening in my country. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted to become the first "sanctuary church body" in the country during the churchwide assembly. I'm not entirely clear on what exactly this means yet, but it could look like providing shelter for undocumented immigrants, equipping folks to serve as first responders during raids, advocating for immigrants in deportation cases, fighting for the end of mass detentions and family separations, and "extended radical hospitality." My own understanding of Christianity means I sort of feel like WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, THEN towards churches that don't already do this, and certainly there are many churches outside the ELCA that engage in this work, service, and love of our neighbors, and who are expansive and inclusive in what it means to call someone a neighbor. Not all churches are silent or complacent in the face of the status quo. All the same, I'm grateful for the vote.

(It's not easy to believe in much, these days.)

Anyway, as I said, we arrived at the airport yesterday with time to spare. After the turkey sandwich, after the wine, after the journalling, the kids and I found seats near our gate while Matt walked around and enjoyed his last pint of Surly's before returning to the Pacific Northwest. I opened up Facebook and saw the posting from the ELCA: the churchwide assembly also voted to adopt the social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action." They included a video of the assembly singing "Canticle of the Turning." It is one of my absolute favorite hymns, and in that moment, listening to all those voices, it gave me chills -- and then it brought me to tears. Right there in the Humphrey Terminal in Minneapolis. I let my kids play on the iPad and I wept openly at the gate. Then I downloaded the statement itself -- all 48 pages -- and read it on the plane. This week I'm going to print out a hard copy. It gives me something close to hope.

I wasn't going to go to church this morning. We were exhausted last night, and the kids really needed some down time because after a week of the lake and grandparents and cousins and wild feral joyful freedom and about ten desserts a day, they weren't really ready to be normal humans in public. But then I remembered that it was my Sunday to help count the week's offering. I even considered just showing up after the service, but I woke up early -- still on Minnesota time -- and I really wanted to go. So I did. But I also felt all kinds of something, so I sat by myself, towards the back. I almost put on a skirt, but then I remembered that we had signed up to run concessions at the Blast Off Soccer Tournament this afternoon, and I didn't really feel like changing, either. So I dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, and I drove my weepy, tired self to church this morning, and I slipped in near the back. And the thing was that I knew it was okay. I knew I could show up in shorts and a t-shirt and be a little weird and people there would still love me, and I really did feel perfectly comfortable slipping into the back by myself. And I felt okay crying a little at times when it didn't really make a lot of sense for me to be crying.

Sometimes I have to laugh a bit when people talk about faith as a crutch, because it would be so much easier not to go to church. It would be easier not to believe in this totally crazy stuff I actually do believe. The church has caused so, so much harm, and it continues to cause harm, and on top of that, it asks us to believe in the impossible. So like, I get it. I get why people leave, and I understand why people don't walk through the door. But somehow, here I am. Maybe this is, again, a consequence of my birth -- I was born into a family who brought me into this messy church, and even though that family has drifted into different faith communities, communities into which I cannot follow and in which I don't really belong, I'm grateful for my roots.

I wasn't much older than my daughter when I read Madeleine L'Engle's Crosswicks Journals; I think that was where she wrote about someone asking her whether she believed in God without any doubt, and she replied -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that she believed in God with all of her doubts.

Roots and doubts. That's what I have.

What I have might not be hope. But it's not nothing.

My heart shall sing
Of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn!
--Canticle of the Turning

Where were you? (Or, Grief and Despair and Teacher Appreciation Week)

Every day, I write in a Gratitude Journal. It's not my regular journal, the notebook I carry with me at all times that catches whatever happens to fall out of my head and onto the paper; it's just a place for me to jot down something every single day. That's all this notebook holds. Because I believe deeply in the importance of practicing daily intentional gratitude, even when things are garbage. Maybe even especially then. It tethers me to hope, I guess, and it also reminds me to notice things, which is essential for a writer. The way the cherry blossoms fall to the sidewalk. The smell of the morning. The increasingly fleeting moments when my son slips his hand into mine, just for a second, when we're crossing a street together. Realizing that we have vegetable spring rolls from Trader Joe's in the freezer after all -- or, even better, that I mentioned offhandedly to my husband that I really wished we had those lava cakes from Trader Joe's, and two days later he slipped some into the freezer without saying anything. He's seriously awesome like that.

I haven't written anything today, even though I have plenty of gratitude welling inside me. But there's something else welling inside me: Fatigue. Heartbreak. Rage. Right now, as I write this, I feel exhausted with the effort of trying not to let it completely and totally consume me, because I'm afraid of what that looks like. If I were to pick up my Gratitude Journal right now, I might write that I'm grateful I got to bring home both of my babies from school today when other parents are waiting in the hospital because their babies were shot at school. And isn't that sick? Isn't that just ridiculous? Rage. Fatigue. I'm so tired of this.

Where were you when you learned about the eleventy billionth mass shooting of 2019, or the eleventy billionth school shooting since Columbine, since Sandy Hook, in the United States of America? I tried to search the actual numbers, but they vary a bit. Basically, it's more than one mass shooting per day, and how many days have there been in 2019 so far? I don't know, I'm too tired and angry to do all that mathing. It all adds up to this: Way Too Fucking Many.

Here's where I was:

I was sitting in my car, waiting for my kids after school. Feeling guilty because I didn't teach well today. Because I haven't parented particularly well today. I've been snappish and tired at all of my kids lately, the kids born of my body and the kids who also share my heart. They all piss me off because that's what happens in May and I am not always good at Rising Above.

I was reading another article about extinction and all the ways we are incinerating the planet. I was reading Mike Pompeo's actual words: “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade." This is from our Secretary of State. Are we living a horrible dystopian novel? I think we are.

I was reading about the man in Ohio who raped and impregnated an eleven-year-old child, and because of Ohio's "Heartbeat Bill" (House Bill 493), that child will be forced to carry that pregnancy to term (or as long as her child's body can) unless her family has the resources to get her the hell out of there. A child that is younger than my child. If you think there is ANYTHING okay about that, if you think this is in any way "pro life," then you're a fucking monster. Exit stage left, good-bye, we're done here.

I was reading more posts about Rachel Held Evans. And grieving. Grieving. I would never have guessed that her death could have impacted me on such a visceral level, perhaps because I never could have imagined her death. Not now, not as a writer and wife and mother of two very young children, not as a person I've wished for years was one of my actual real-life friends. I'm just about to start reading her latest book. I'm looking at pictures of her with Nadia Bolz-Weber, and these two women -- this is not an exaggeration -- changed my life and gave me back faith I'd thought I'd lost, women whose words felt like a whisper in my ear when I wasn't sure there was any room left in church for me. Rachel's blog has been on the "Required Reading" list of this blog since I discovered it, way back whenever. (I've been trying to write about her for days. I think I still will.)

I was tired and angry and sad and defeated. It's May, which is the worst time of year to be a teacher. The worst. I don't want to do it anymore. I feel inadequate in every way, exasperated in every way, and utterly convinced I've come to the end of my time of being any good at it. I know this is just what happens in May; I have years of journals to back me up. This is part of the cycle, and I've learned to trust that. But still. Still. The feeling is hard. Add to that the feeling of pressure to just keep up with everything and be competent in other areas of my life, because hey! I'm not just a teacher, I'm a wife and a mother, and when I leave campus I have to enter into a totally different space. Most of the time, that is a deep blessing and I have the privilege of finding a beautiful balance in my life. I have a partner who is wholly involved. I have the privilege to choose to work "part-time." (Which comes with a whole lot of bullshit I've written about and will write about again, but never believe I don't understand the privilege in the choice -- to do the work I love and maximize my time with my family in a way that supports us all.) But today, I was tired of juggling track and Tae Kwon Do and soccer and band and confirmation. Matt and I are chaperoning four field trips in as many weeks. This month we have belt testing and two concerts and I forget how many games and track meets. (These are the things that make me realize that the sources of some of my stress and fatigue are also the things I write about in my Gratitude Journal. This is what it means to be a mother.)

This is the month in which our daughter turns thirteen, and it matters to me, and I am also exhausted already trying to make it matter and be the perfect hostess and make it special for her, because I'm her mother, and so far all I can manage to do is say to Matt, "So, we'll grill food outside over Memorial Weekend one night." What else? How do I do this well? How can I make it matter to my girl, my firstborn? One of the only things that tethers me to any sense of hope? And also, how can I look her in the eye, knowing what a horrible mess we adults are handing her?

That is where I was this afternoon, when I learned of the latest school shooting. How many times have I written about those here? Isn't that absurd? I was angry and tired and sad, sitting in my car, waiting for my children. Compartmentalizing, because I can't be dumping all that on kids who are nine and twelve when they jump in the car bursting with things to say: "Can you sign my field trip form?" and "Let me tell you what happened in Conditioning today." (Please, God, let me never forget the loveliness of these ordinary moments when my children tumble into the car, elbowing each other, arguing over whose backpacks are taking up too much space, one person heaving her trumpet case into the front seat, the other shoving a permission slip in my face and reminding me that Popcorn Day is tomorrow.)

That was four hours ago. Only four hours later, and the school shooting (two suspects in custody, UPDATED ONE STUDENT DEAD, eight others injured) is already way down on the news, underneath "Mueller fought Comey memo release" and "Tax documents show Trump businesses lost more than $1 billion in a decade."

This is where I am now: sitting at my table, after Tae Kwon Do, after soccer, dinner simmering on the stove, trying to write through tears in my eyes while my kids relax in front of the TV, which is a rare treat on a weeknight. I apologized for snapping at them earlier. And I told them: "There was a school shooting today."

And they said, "Another one?"

How does that response not shatter your heart? How can we have that conversation again? Again? But we did. And we will. Hey, America, maybe for Teacher Appreciation Week, instead of free notepads and pens or highlighters and cute little notes in our mailboxes, you can get us some fucking gun control.

So that's where I was, and that's where I am. I wish I lived in a country that cared about its children -- all of them. I expect better. Or maybe I just want better, long for better, dream for better, because to expect implies hope, and frankly, tonight, I'm fresh out of that. The place in my heart that holds hope has been taken over by Despair. And Rage. And Fatigue.

I still believe in practicing intentional gratitude, despite the grief and rage and despair. And maybe that's why I write anything here, too -- because words connect us in our grief and rage and despair, and maybe that's what hope is, the impossibility of holding hands in the darkness, swimming for the light.

I'm a worst-case-scenario kind of optimist

I cried at school today. Twice.

It's funny, kind of. Two days ago I started a Facebook post like this: "Sometimes teaching is hard because kids are hard. Hey, moms, you know how there are days when you want to just lock yourself in the bathroom and cry? Teachers have those moments too. Sometimes it's just incredibly defeating and demoralizing." But it wasn't the kids today, at all. Today it was the world in general, the absurdity of social media, the absurdity of adults on social media, and fucking ants.

I stepped into a bathroom stall at work today and permitted myself about thirty seconds of actual, honest-to-God, am-I-really-sobbing-in-a-bathroom-stall-at-work crying.

So, I mean, let's just jump right into it: this week my colleagues and I learned of threats of guns and shootings directed towards our school. My school, where I show up every day, where I've shown up just about every day for my entire adult life. This is my home. I don't take kindly to folks fucking with it. But look, I also do trust the police when they tell us they have investigated thoroughly and found no credible threat. They investigate far more threats than most of us ever hear about. So while I was pissed, I didn't go home and wring my hands about going to school. As my friend Kailey said, it literally never once occurred to me to not go to school today.

Which was perhaps why I was so furious when an elementary teacher at another school posted on social media last night that if she taught at my school, she'd for sure call in sick.

Well, isn't that nice for you.

And also: how dare you. You don't work there. You don't get to speculate about a situation you know nothing about. I floundered in my rage, which was all twisted up in my rage at the world in which we live, a world that includes this country where our students expect this anyway even though it doesn't have to be this way except for the fact that we refuse to even try to do anything about it.

Becky, one of my colleagues and dear friends, responded right away, far more eloquently than I could have in that moment: "The e-mail [to parents] says we have systems in place to keep school safe. I'm part of that system. Unless school's cancelled, my students will be safer and more comfortable with me, learning, than with a sub or with a stressed-out colleague covering my class during their planning." I chimed in then, to say that I'd be there too, of course. And then a bunch of our colleagues and friends followed in kind. Me too. I'm there. I'll be there.

My friend Shonda followed up with this: "Speculating about other people's work environments is not helpful. It's just like teenagers stirring up drama. We shouldn't be doing that to each other." At that point, the teacher from the other school deleted her post. Which, good. I was heartened by two things: that my co-workers instantly jumped in with a show of absolute love and solidarity, and that today my students called out the hysteria of adults in our community as precisely that: unhelpful and, frankly, ridiculous.

To be clear, I do not judge anyone who decided to keep their child home from school today. I received more than one e-mail from a parent who said, "I know it's probably a false alarm, but..." Six years ago, when Sandy Hook happened three thousand miles away, it took absolutely every ounce of human strength I had to not abandon my seventh period class and drive across town to pick up my own first grader. What I take issue with is inflammatory nonsense on social media, especially inflammatory nonsense spread by adults, inflammatory nonsense that fuels hysteria and spreads inaccuracies. This can cause real harm and it is not okay. I have no patience for the adults in my community who have jumped on social media to accuse our schools and the police department of not taking this seriously. What would "taking it seriously" look like? Canceling school for every threat? What? What information do you think you're entitled to, exactly?

Anyway, it literally never occurred to me (to many of us? Any of us?) to stay home. And Becky's response reminded me why. This is our job. Full stop.

And I wasn't scared to go to school today. I felt unsettled, but not out of fear -- more out of sadness. I felt overwhelmed by not only the reality that a great many of our students weren't coming to school because of threats of gun violence, but also by the backlash, and the feeling, once again, that somehow I've got to defend...something. Everything. Why I teach in public school, why I send my kids to public school. Things are pretty terrible sometimes, but also, teaching fills me with hope in a way that I'm not sure anything else could. Last week I read Pam Houston's beautiful new book, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, and I found myself writing notes in the margins everywhere, things like, "I love that she is both an optimist and given to worst-case scenarios. I love you, Pam Houston." (Note: she wasn't writing about public education, she was writing about fires and climate change, and I know I'll likely reach for that book again in August when I fully expect to spend yet another summer reading about my homestate burning and breathing toxic, smoky air here at home, too. Because I'll need the hope in a different context.)

And it was a quiet day. Even on normally low-attendance days, like, say, the day before Thanksgiving break when we have our emergency earthquake drill and classes are short and almost nobody comes to class so we make hand turkeys, kids are still skipping all over campus, and the disruption in schedule makes us all the more aware of kids and their energy, somehow. Today, the walkways were silent and empty in a way I've never seen them during a school day. Ever.

So there weren't too many folks around to witness the moment when I cried over the ants I found in a great seething mass in my classroom. There were so many ants in my recycling bin they could have carried it outside themselves. One of my kids informed me that they were all over the floor near his desk. The floor itself seemed to be moving. Kids have been absolutely trashing the computer lab with food and that doesn't help, but the ants had already infested the classrooms around me and I've been strict about food in my room. It wasn't enough. They attacked. My principal sent an e-mail to those of us teaching in those rooms letting us know that they'd be sprayed over the weekend, and also, she will be enforcing a ban on eating in those rooms for the next month or so.

I found ants crawling on my desk. I took absolutely everything off of it and wiped it down with Clorox. I almost didn't even have it in me to put everything back on my desk. I thought that possibly the only thing I would be able to do in that moment was say, "Ah, fuck it," and just go home after all. It didn't help that I'd just come from a meeting I'd had scheduled for weeks, one that reminded me that I don't think I'm very good at working with adults. I played a solitary round of "What other job would I even be good at?" which is a thing I do when I'm all out of perspective.

I didn't go home. I walked to the staff bathroom and cried pitifully in the stall. Then I washed my face and brushed my teeth and went back to class, because what else was there to do?

*

I'd planned a fairly quiet teaching day anyway. It's April, and my kids are stressed. I know they need some space to breathe. Most of my kids did that somewhere else today, but the kids who showed up in my room -- well, I was glad to see them. I asked them if they were okay and if they wanted to talk. For the most part, they did seem okay, and they also wanted to talk. They asked me what would happen if. If. If. This, friends, is a conversation I have with my kids every single year now -- a real, immediate, in-the-moment conversation. This is the country in which we live. Tonight I talked to my own daughter about it. (It. What a giant It.) Her school had received a similar threat, though she hadn't heard anything about and she said everyone at school seemed fine. But she has already shared that she's had these conversations in her classes with her teachers too, bless them.

Near the end of the day, one of my students asked me if I'd considered staying home, and I said, "Not for a single moment." (I'd stopped weeping about the ants and my meeting by then, and I didn't tell him I had considered fleeing for entirely different and stupid reasons.) He asked me if I was scared. And I said, "Today? No. But that's not really the point. If we have school, this is where I need to be." Then he asked if I'd keep my own kids home, and I said, "Well, my daughter is sitting in her own English class right now, because I trust the systems we have in place to do they best they can for her, too. And I know her teachers are having the same conversations." I did not tell him these conversations break our hearts and fill the cracks with pure rage. I did not tell him that I pray for my children's teachers in a way I never thought I'd need to before I understood that this country sees a mass shooting just about every day.

"That's why I trust you," he said. (By the way, show me a teacher who says, in my presence, "At least the parents of the honors kids care enough about them to keep them home today," and I will show you a teacher who will not ever teach one of my children. Nope, no thank you MA'AM.)

Sometimes teaching is hard. Sometimes it is disheartening and demoralizing. I really wish I didn't cry so easily, and I wish I had thicker skin. I'd be healthier, probably, if I wasn't given to worst-case scenarios. At the same time, I'm a stubborn optimist and dammit, teaching still gives me hope. Sometimes there are these moments that are hard, and they are the moments that remind me that I want to be exactly where I am.

This tired old rage

I've been trying to write here for a week. Two weeks. I carry a journal with me everywhere and keep scrawling bits and pieces. Last week I wanted to write about fear, and anger, and grief. And then I didn't post, and then another mass shooting happened, and then it just all seemed pointless. Here we go again.

I just keep writing the same things, over and over again. I'm so tired. I'm so angry. I'm so tired of being angry.

Last week during warm-ups before Suzannah's soccer game, I walked around and around the track at the middle school where they were playing. The fine drizzle hadn't yet settled into the steady rain that would drench us by the end of the game, and I needed to move. Otherwise I would have scrolled restlessly and angrily through my phone, unable to pick up the novel I had tucked inside my purse. The world just feels so terrible. I wanted to be hopeful before election week, but in 2016 Donald Trump was elected president and since then --

I keep trying but I don't even know how to finish that sentence.

I went to church last week, on All Saints Sunday where we honor our dead. In faith, I will settle for nothing less than life. My pastor's own mother died last week, and she delivered a sermon on All Saints Sunday, and I can't imagine having to speak about that with the weight of such grief. We grieve and we honor the lives of those we love. We also grieve and struggle with the mass shootings that have become incredibly ordinary. In our America, a student shot and killed another student and classes resumed later that day. A man shot a couple in a Kroger after a failed attempt to enter a church. A man killed two women in a yoga studio. Another man killed eleven people and wounded several more in the Tree of Life Synagogue. Another week in our America, where toxic white men -- the most dangerous kind in America -- terrorize, and our administration fuels their rage.

I tried to write about all of that and then another man opened fire in a bar and killed a dozen people and wounded several more. One of those killed survived the shooting in Las Vegas, and does anyone find it sort of insane that these shootings are beginning to overlap? But within half a day it was halfway down the page on the news. When Columbine happened, the country seemed to stop; now we barely blink. All those people dead, not even two weeks after the mass shooting at Tree of Life, and how many mass shootings have we seen this year? Remember when I was going to blog only after they happened? I'm way behind. I'd have a couple hundred entries right now. I try to make up for it in some small way by donating money, but I'm finding it pretty tough to write (who will read this tired old rage anymore?) and even more difficult to pray.

My faith is pretty shaky these days.

These were thoughts on my mind as I drove to church last week while my son chattered in the backseat and my daughter sulked because apparently we did not explicitly tell her about Daylight Savings Time and therefore we deprived her of an extra hour of sleep, which I do not even understand because this child wakes on her own at some absurd hour every morning. (I'm not kidding. Never once in her entire life have I had to wake her up. Not when we had to rise at four in the morning for an early flight to Omaha. Not once to get ready for school, which for her starts at 7:00 because she is in jazz band.) The big picture was weighing on my heart quite a bit, all wrapped up in the small one, the picture of my senselessly privileged life that I happen to love quite a lot. It has been a difficult month, a difficult fall. I'm still recovering from one of the most intense experiences I've had as an educator -- our MYP 5-year Evaluation was brutal in ways I didn't anticipate, and it feels deeply personal. I understand it's not really personal, because it's so much bigger than me and it's also not about me, but it feels that way at times, since I've poured so much of my energy into this program that I love and believe in, and now I have to sit and wait for weeks (or more) for the team's findings, upon which everything that happens next depends, and our Matters to Be Addressed do feel like things I should have been able to better prepare for, even when they're matters out of my control. And it's still not the big picture, or the most important thing, but right now everything feels tangled together: passion and love and grief and anger and fear. I've felt all of those things, every day, for two months. Really ever since the morning my grandmother died, the same morning I stood in front of the staffs from three schools, three hours after I learned of my grandmother's death, to try to prepare for this visit, this thing I've told them all is not by any means a final exam but which, I confess, still feels like one to me.

The personal and the political, the public and the private, and the weight of it all. The lines between them blur.

*

On All Saints Sunday at my church, the names of the dead are read aloud, and a bell sounds for each one. I experienced this for the first time ten years ago, two months after my grandpa died. I submitted his name but wasn't prepared for the absolutely shattering love and grief I felt when I heard someone else speak his name. Charlie Griffith. It was beautiful, and sad. Six years ago I listened to the bell sound for my niece, Bailey Rae, the name of someone who was born and should have lived but didn't. Last week, I listened for three names: Jay Hoger, Matt's uncle and my children's great-uncle. Sean Mach, the husband of one of my oldest friends. Esther Griffith, great-grandmother of my children. My grandmother. The one who called me her "precious" for my whole entire life, right up until the last time I hugged her in July, the month before she died.

Jay and Sean both died from cancer and it absolutely disrupted the natural order of the universe. These men should still be here to raise their children and love their grandchildren.

My grandmother made no secret of her readiness to die, even before my grandfather did ten years ago. I don't know how to make sense of any of this.

My feelings towards my grandmother were complicated. She loved me fiercely and unconditionally. I have also felt, since I was in college, since the days that I called her in my loneliness at the 800-number she and my grandpa bought just so I could call them whenever I wanted, that I would have disappointed them as much as I made them proud. At my grandpa's funeral ten years ago, one of his friends told me just how much he'd talked about me, and I cried about that for a long time. I know he loved me. And I know my grandmother loved me. But I'd also known since I was in college that I believed very different things than they did.

"You really think that?" my grandma asked me, when I told her about a paper I was writing. "You really, really do?"

I really, really did. And I still do. The "what" doesn't matter, really, does it? But that's the moment when I wondered, for the first time, whether love really was unconditional.

And all these years later, I'm still trying to reconcile that.

I've spent the past nineteen years preparing for both of my grandparents' deaths, in a sense, ever since my grandfather smoked his last cigarette. I was also utterly unprepared for the ways in which their losses would drive me to my knees. Their fingerprints are all over my life and my heart. I know they loved me. I loved them. And I have no idea how we would navigate this world together if they were still here.

*

We've had nearly as many mass shootings as there are days in 2018. That is not the natural order of things, but we treat it as such, and that makes me absolutely sick with rage. Last Sunday I wondered how long it would take to ring a bell for the names of those who have died from gun violence in our country. Opinions differ on what counts as a mass shooting, but the fact is that thousands of people have died when they should not have died. How long would it take to read 12,000 names?

*

It has been six years since Sandy Hook -- the span of the life of all those murdered first graders. My own daughter was in first grade that year, and I still cannot read a complete account of that day. I cannot. All those children should be in middle school, carrying instrument cases and telling terrible jokes and breaking out for the first time and using deodorant and slamming their bedroom doors and rolling their eyes at everything their parents say while still crawling onto the couch with them for a surprising snuggle at the end of a tough day. But they were murdered in their own classroom, and we did absolutely nothing. Now my children practice active shooter drills in their schools because we consider shootings as inevitable as anything else. I am not the first nor the last person to lose all hope because of that: when twenty first-graders can be murdered before they live to learn multiplication, when we prove that we love guns more than children, there is just not much hope to be had. And it just keeps happening, because our country only pretends to value life.

The same thing. I keep writing the same thing. And I am trying to write about too many things.

The same tired rage. Here we fucking go again.

The personal and the political. The public and the private. The blurred boundaries between them.

Who will we choose to be?

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Today I left the house before eight o'clock, stepping into the humid Minnesota morning, propelled up the street by Shirley Manson's voice -- the only music that could get me moving. But movement was the thing I needed after a night of broken sleep. The heat rises to the second floor where I sleep at my in-laws' house, and the fan could only do so much; more than that, though, I couldn't quiet my brain. So I tossed and turned, and then I ran.

The morning was quiet, even as I jogged along a busy road before turning onto a quieter, shadier street. The thick, muggy air seemed to muffle even the traffic. Insects whirred in the grass. A sprinkler shuddered to a stop just before I could reach it and cool off; I suppose it had been on a timer to run in the cooler dawn.

I ran to quiet my own thoughts for awhile. It mostly worked. By the time I reached the spot where I usually turn around, I was so drenched in sweat that I nearly just sat down on the sidewalk. But I had to finish packing, and we had a rental car to return and a flight to catch. So I panted my way back to the house and vowed not to check the news until I'd folded the rest of last night's laundry into the kids' suitcases, showered, and had some coffee.

It has been a terrible week.

I mean, it has and it hasn't. I've just returned from a lovely family trip to Minnesota. We spent a few days in Duluth, a city I haven't visited since college. We stayed in a beautiful old mansion with Matt's parents and his brother and family. Carmen drove over and we spent a day together, and it was wonderful and necessary -- we haven't seen each other in nearly four years, which is the longest we've ever gone without seeing each other since we were eighteen years old. Suzannah and Isaac loved spending time with their cousins. We shared meals with relatives we don't see often, both near Duluth and back in the Twin Cities. I read a few books and carved out a little time to write. Matt even made sure we stopped by Birchbark Books -- a favorite stop of mine in Minneapolis -- so I could finally use a gift card from my mother-in-law.

So all of that should have made for a lovely start to the summer, except that underneath it all I have felt a relentless churning dread, a sickening shame over what our country is revealing itself to be. I sat upstairs while the kids played downstairs, listening to the sound of their laughter. I sat right down on the carpet and leaned against the bed and clutched my head and exchanged a few texts with friends who were also sitting somewhere clutching their heads, literally or figuratively. This has been a very, very bad news week. I'm just sick. I don't know where to start. We traumatize thousands of children. Children. Without apology or shame. We have no regard for human life if it isn't white, "Christian," and born on American soil (or unborn on American soil. We seem to stop caring once babies are earthside). We now rank in the top ten countries where it's worst to be a woman. As a public school teacher I'm no stranger to anti-union rhetoric, but now, suddenly, I'm actually receiving e-mails on my relatively public school account encouraging me not to pay union dues. And on, and on, and on. Seattle, a city with appalling rates of homelessness, now has an app to make it easier to eject folks from camps. Where, where is our humanity? Tell me that, Christians. Tell me. Talk to me about what it means to be pro-life. Talk to me about family values. And also, what piece of your soul did you sell, Judge Kennedy?

And then today, after my run, after my shower, after our trip to the airport, after I settled in with a white wine flight and my journal and the novel I'm reading while Matt took the kids to work out their wiggles before our trip home, I read the news again: another shooting, five journalists killed.

(When you read that the suspect is in custody, you know right away that it's another angry white man -- the kind most likely to commit mass shootings, and the kind most likely to be taken alive.)

(Nothing about this is surprising, considering the president's constant and vicious attacks on the media and some of his most ardent and vocal supporters actively encouraging assaults on them. This is our country. This is America.)

It would be pretty easy for Matt and me to say we don't like to be political, because honestly, we'll probably be fine, and being political means getting uncomfortable. We don't have to do that. We're white. We're "Christian." We were born into fucking senseless privilege. No one is coming for our children. But because we are white, because we are "Christian," because we are fine, this is our work to do and it is our mess to clean up and it is our debt to pay. It just is. And we're not doing it nearly damn well enough, which is one of the things I'm struggling with tonight. I know this. (Another thing I'm struggling with: people who still say they're "not political." Isn't that great for you? Sleep tight, I guess?)

After our kids were showered and bathed and tucked into bed tonight, Matt and I caught up on this week's episode of The Handmaid's Tale. I first read the novel when I was nineteen, huddled under a blanket in my freezing crew quarters at the fishing lodge in Alaska where I would spend my first summer in college. Now, twenty years later, I teach it in IB literature as part of the junior curriculum. It has always both moved and terrified me, but now that terror is an entirely different beast because it feels real and immediate. The terrifying brilliance of Margaret Atwood is that all of her writing feels real, but this has moved several solid steps away from "speculative" fiction since she wrote it three decades ago.

I don't really even know how to end this. It's nearly midnight, and my family is sleeping. Matt kissed me a bit ago and said, "Don't stay up too late." I want so badly to just go to sleep, to turn off my brain. He calls it the hamster wheel inside my head. I'm exhausted, but what is my exhaustion? It's nothing, really.

Tonight maybe I just end with this, with Rebecca Solnit's words instead of my own: You can't know, won't know how and why it matters, and when the results will appear, but that didn't stop the abolitionists or the suffragists or the civil rights heroes or the environmental champions or the Dreamers. Ask yourself what would Harvey Milk do? What would Harriet Tubman do? What would Ella Baker do? What would Emma Goldman do? Maybe you can't do all they did, but you can do something, and that matters, and doing it is a much better way to survive this regime than doing nothing, for your soul as well as your nation.

It's not just that we can; it's that we have to. I think I still believe that.

Eight students, two teachers

Where were you when you learned of the 22nd school shooting in the United States in 2018?

Can you name all the shootings that happened before this one? Because I can't. Because they happen all the time. A flicker on a screen. Another white male shooter (the kind that is responsible for most of our mass shootings and the kind that is almost always taken alive and fed a meal instead of shot on sight--the police do have that skill set). Another school. Another day in America.

In 2018 I was going to donate money and I was going to write every single time a school shooting happened and I have not and I cannot name them all. So consider this night my catching up.

I can tell you where I was today, even if I cannot, off the top of my head, name all of the shootings that have occurred this year. I had to look them up. Some don't even make my screen flicker. Today, I was at school. Early. Hours earlier than my contract requires, because my job is bigger than my contract recognizes. I kissed my sleepy children good-bye, I kissed my husband who went to work late so that I could go to work early. I drove into the dawn, prepared to work through the day that was supposed to be the joyful (?) culmination of nearly two years' worth of work in a role I feel I am still clumsily learning. Of collecting and cajoling and planning and organizing and praying that all the adults I work with won't hate me at the end of the day, because I am still learning the ways in which asking for things from adults is different from asking for things from kids. Or maybe it's not different. I don't know. It's hard in different ways.

My friend Kailey was out today, on an airplane this morning, but she is still a teacher and teachers work from airplanes, so we messaged each other via Facebook.

She sent this message after she landed: "I just got off the plane to see the news."

I hadn't seen the news. By then, I was deep into the work of the day. I looked at the news.

Jesus, I thought. Again.

The students of Santa Fe High School said, I wasn't surprised. I was just scared. It was going to happen eventually. This is the country we have created for our children.

Eight students, and two teachers. No one is surprised, and we all know it will happen again. My eight-year-old son is not surprised. My children know this will happen again. When I was in second grade, or sixth grade, or tenth grade, it never occurred to me that I could be shot in my own school. This is a thing my own children think about. This is a thing my children's teachers prepare for. This is a thing I talk about with my students.

Not long ago, out of the blue, one of my sophomores said, "Winslow, if someone came to our door with a gun, what would we do?"

I said, "If they came to our door, you run that way," I said, gesturing to the computer lab. "You get the hell out the other door, and you run." (This is just good sense. It's also what we're taught in our Active Shooter Training. Because Active Shooter Training is a thing in my job now.)

"Wait, what about you?"

"I make sure you all get the hell out, Babies."

"But you come too, right?"

"I mean, after you're all out. Yeah, I'll come."

"But what if he starts shooting?"

"You run out the back door, and you keep running."

"But what do you do?"

"I do my damndest to make sure he doesn't get to you."

"You just stay and get shot? That's messed up. We'd stay with you."

"No. You don't."

I teared up a little. With love and anger, both. Love, because these kiddos of mine were so, so incredulous and indignant. Anger because this is an actual conversation we have. No, it's not part of my job description. This is not what I signed up for. And yes, it is what I would do. It's not a question. It's not okay, but it has become part of the job expectation for those of us who teach kids. Our bodies are on the line. They just are. And our great, broken country seems to have very little interest in changing this reality.

And I have to tell you, I'm tired of donating money for this shit, because I really feel like this shit shouldn't be a thing I worry about. If it happens at my school, or my children's school, and let me tell you how typing those words constricts my chest to the point where I can barely stand to type this (my children's teachers are parents to their own children, and their bodies are on the line for mine), I won't be surprised. And I hope it doesn't happen, and I pray (I do pray) it doesn't, but it is clearly going to be happening again somewhere in this broken country, because it just always does.

So where were you? I was in the Instructional Resource Room at my own school, working with the coordinators at our feeder middle schools to finalize nearly two years' worth of work we need to submit to the International Baccalaureate Organization in order to maintain our authorization. I checked my phone. I gasped out loud. The others already knew. We didn't talk about it at all. What is there to say? It's another one. It's another one.

I cried a lot today, in the end. I worked, I felt my body growing tense with the effort to stay on task, I spoke like a normal adult human being to other adult human beings and a few students. Or I tried, anyway. We finished our work. Have a good weekend, we said. And I sat there this afternoon, finally alone with all of it, with the strangeness of letting go of nearly two years' worth of work, with the weight of this day, with the strange heartbreak of this entire week that will not be made clear on this very public blog. I packed up my laptop, my notebooks. I walked back to my empty, quiet classroom. I sat down at my desk in a building that empties quickly on a Friday afternoon, and I cried for twenty minutes. I couldn't tell you exactly why. One of my best friends found me there before I left, someone who always checks in at the end of the day, and I didn't need to say anything. That this person was there to hug me before I drove home mattered. That Kailey was there even when she wasn't physically there mattered. I was suddenly so overwhelmed: by love and grief and gratitude. By anger and helpless rage. And by something I couldn't name. What is the word for that?

We need a better word for this

On this cold and drizzly Friday afternoon, I'm sitting at my dining room table across from my son, who is coloring. He shed his socks like normal within five minutes of dropping his backpack on the family room floor, and now he's in his usual position, kneeling on the chair, bare feet tucked under his bum.

Let me back up a bit.

Last night, I attended a district-wide meeting on Gun Violence and School Safety. Twelve hours later, I'm still processing the intensity of it all. I sat across the room from teachers at my daughter's school. I sat across the room from my son's teacher, and I listened to her speak about how sometimes, she has to sacrifice the sacred math and reading time for more important things--the kids' social and emotional needs. ("Even if I get in trouble," she said.) I wanted to tell her then that as the mother of a child in her classroom, I appreciate every single second she spends on these kids' social and emotional needs. My son comes home from school talking about that. He doesn't come home from school eager to talk about what he's learning in math.

But I didn't have the chance last night, or at any rate, I lost the ability to speak.

We had some important conversations last night, and teachers raised important questions. We talked about what we need, as educators, from our district. I was grateful to be there with friends and colleagues who, as one of them said, could lead and listen and hold space. It was a difficult, necessary, and emotional night.

Gun violence and school safety weighs heavily on my heart as an educator every day now. And it weighs on me as a mother who understands that other teachers put their bodies on the line every day for my children. Last night, I was overwhelmed both as a teacher and as a mother, sitting in a room with my children's teachers and watching a video called "Surviving a School Shooting." I watched my son's teacher watch this video, and something in me broke. Tears began streaming down my face, and I couldn't stop them. I tried, but I just could not stop crying. Many teachers were visibly upset after this video, but during the debrief, all I could say to my table was this: "My son's teacher is here. I watched her watch this video." I couldn't articulate any more than that.

I cried all the way home. I wasn't sobbing; it just felt like something inside me had come loose, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to tighten it back up. I walked in the door after thirteen hours away from my family, exhausted and spent and trying to tighten whatever it was that had come loose. Unsuccessful, I just went to bed instead.

I woke up at four o'clock this morning, unable to go back to sleep. My eyes were sore and swollen enough that I soaked a cotton pad in witch hazel and pressed it against my eyelids for a few minutes. But I actually had a decent day; these days, going to school heals my heart even when my heart is so frequently broken there, because if there is hope to be found in this broken world, in this broken country, it's in our kids.

And then this happened: Twenty-five minutes before my son's school day ended, as I drove from my own school to pick him up, his school went into lockdown. Someone had set off illegal fireworks outside, near enough to my son's classroom that it sounded like gunfire. The adults heard it. The kids heard it.

Imagine what it feels like to be a teacher, emotionally drained after a night of intense discussion surrounding what steps our district will take to deal with the threat of gun violence. Imagine a night of intense discussion of our individual schools' safety needs, a night in which teachers see a simulation of an elementary school shooting and see their own students--see themselves--in that video. Then imagine the very next afternoon: a sound just outside the classroom door that sounds like gunfire, because an entire box of fireworks ignited at once is no joke, especially in March. Imagine the lockdown, imagine sheltering frightened second-graders behind overturned desks in the corner, away from the door.

I didn't have the whole story when I met my son at his door; the call from the district office referenced only "loud noises" and reassured us that students and staff were safe at all times. But I watched those nervous kids leave class today, and I saw the tears in their teacher's eyes, and all I could do was hug her and say Thank you. Thank you for being there for my son.

My son sits across from me, coloring.

We're talking about it, intermittently. I ask him how it made him feel.

"It was so scary," he said. He told me exactly what they heard and how they hid. His teacher is wonderful; she kept them calm, and they talked about it afterwards. Shared a group hug. She creates a safe space for these kids to process their feelings, which matters far more to me than math or reading. At home, Isaac and I talked about how teachers work to keep kids safe. We talked about how it was good to practice, so they know what to do.

Less than 24 hours ago, I watched my son's teacher watch that video, and this afternoon, my son sheltered behind an overturned desk after hearing what he thought was a shooter. My little boy was terrified in his own classroom. He has never felt anything but safe in schools. My boy has spent his entire life in schools. And today, that safety was stolen from him a little bit. I'd hoped it wouldn't happen so soon.

I'm well aware he was never in any real danger. Do you understand that our souls are shaken, though? Because we understand that we are not safe in our schools, and teachers understand that the rest of the country is placing that burden squarely on our shoulders. We have to learn to defend ourselves, to secure ourselves. In the meantime, our country doesn't seem to think it needs to make it any more difficult for those would do harm to have access to the weapons that would harm us. That would violate our "rights."

The insanity defies all words.

So I hold my son on my lap and kiss his cheek before he wriggles out of my grip. So I sit across from my little boy at the dining room table and talk to him about how he felt this afternoon when he thought a shooter was outside his classroom door. So I cry in the shower, cry in my car. So I talk to my students about where to run and how to hide, and I'm learning more about how to fight. So I say to a crying fifteen-year-old boy who is angry and scared, "It's okay not to be okay, because nothing about this is okay." So I scream at the news and nod with my children who already know the adults running the country have failed them. (But the teenagers speaking out may very well be what saves us.)

*

A couple of weeks ago I pondered how active this blog would be if I only posted after a school shooting. Had today "only" been about illegal fireworks and my son's fear, about the collective rage and heartbreak of teachers, I probably would have posted anyway. But as it turns out, two people were shot dead at Central Michigan University, which brings the total count to twelve school shootings so far in 2018.

Shortly after the shooting this morning, my dear friend Alicia posted this:

Shooting at CMU in Michigan. Where a colleague of mine now waits and worries on lockdown, his wife also on lockdown because she works on campus too. And his two daughters? They are on lockdown because of their school’s proximity to campus. It started from a domestic dispute. Never say to me we don’t need stricter gun laws.

It is too damn easy to shoot someone.

And tonight, again, I am making a donation to counter those who believe their right to their weapons weighs more than my child's right to attend school in safety. To live without this fear. To live.

I'm furious. I will never not be furious. We need a better word for this in our language: what word is enough for this fear, this rage, this heartbreak?

The burden is real, and it's difficult to breathe

Teaching, like motherhood, is lonely.

And I'm lucky, because I teach alongside the best of the best. All of the best friends in my life are either teachers themselves or they are related to teachers or they work with kids in schools, and so when they know teachers are grieving, frightened, angry, and damn near paralyzed by love for this terrible job, they are there. Teaching is one of my callings, but I am here to tell you we cannot do it without the support of those in the trenches with us.

The last week has been particularly hard. It's been hard for every teacher I know, because we are all grappling with the implications of yet another school shooting, and our schools and our districts are grappling alongside us, albeit some with more effectiveness or empathy or action than others. At my school, we went into an unannounced lockdown drill on Friday, and by the end of the day, one in which a neighboring community college had also gone into a real lockdown, we were so on-edge it felt surreal. We were just an absolute mess. We were messy with each other. We were a mess in front of our kids, who seemed to find some measure of comfort in that. We were a collective mess all over social media. We are not trying to hide this. It is becoming critically important that we not.

Teachers are not quietly enduring these days. And I think that's why it feels so lonely; it reminds me of what it felt like sometimes to be a new mother, especially -- isolated and criticized and wishing the folks who didn't share my experience could try to empathize and reach out anyway when I was obviously exhausted and desperately lonely. (I think it's probably no coincidence that the best friends who managed to do this without fail even though they didn't have their own children were teachers, because teaching is an awful lot like parenting.)

I've been thinking about this for a few days now. On Friday, I cried intermittently throughout much of the day. I wept all the way home from school. I couldn't hide this from my own kids, nor did I think I should try; I don't want to frighten them, but they are savvy teacher's kids with questions and I owe them honesty in age-appropriate answers. And they had questions. Like: why are guns so easy to get? And why would someone want to shoot kids? And why won't our president and government even try to stop them? (God, a few teenagers eat laundry detergent and now they're trying to legislate that, even though some idiots will always manage to get Tide Pods if they really want them, right? Because TRYING TO MAKE IT HARDER FOR PEOPLE TO CAUSE HARM EVEN IF IT DOESN'T WORK EVERY SINGLE TIME seems like the obvious thing to do, and my children understand this.)

On Friday, I pledged to donate a specific dollar amount to fight this fuckery based on a number of things: comments regarding arming teachers in the classroom, comments about how "It's not a gun problem" or some such nonsense, as well as an amount for the top recipients of N.R.A. money. I had to stop reading social media. I actually blocked one friend-of-a-friend (who has all kinds of opinions about what teachers should do and what we should be fired for), because I don't have that much money in my bank account.

So it's been a rough few days, but I've already made that point. I sat down to write this: I am so grateful for the teachers willing to have the hard conversations, who are willing to be raw and real. Not only the teachers I work with, but the teachers I'm friends with from Seattle to New York City (hi, Becca) and everywhere in between. We've held each other in this heartbreak before, and we are doing it now, but we are angry, and it would be nice if we knew that the rest of the world had our backs as well. Every other week we're talking about what it means to be a teacher who understands that part of the job is putting our bodies on the line for our kids. The silence from those who claim to love us is deafening at times.

But while I drove home with tears in my eyes, and while I cried into my husband's shirt on Friday night and said, "I'm sorry, I don't know how to stop my feelings from pouring out my face, I'm okay and I'm hungry and can we just make some Trader Joe's appetizers?", I texted back and forth with colleagues feeling the same things. Mostly we just loved on each other. I chatted with and e-mailed teacher friends all over the country, and I thought, we're in this together.

Tomorrow I go back to school after a long weekend, and I'm going back feeling grateful for the folks who are going back with me. We've had four days off with our babies, with our families. I ate good food in Portland, played with my kids, laughed with my husband, and bought all the books at Powells. Last night I had dinner with one of my best friends, who is obviously a teacher. This afternoon I curled up on my couch and my daughter covered me with her favorite fleece blanket. I chatted with a couple of my best friends, who are obviously teachers. We're a mess, but we're a mess together. Also: we're not a mess. We're strong, angry, driven by fierce and unrelenting love, and ready to roll up our sleeves and organize. We're powered by a generation of fierce and passionate kids we are privileged to teach (and more importantly, to learn from).

If you love a teacher, surely you know that teacher is heartbroken and angry and damn near paralyzed by love.

But not quite paralyzed. We're not going to stop what we're doing. We're not going to stop having the conversations about what it means to place our bodies between bullets and our kids. Do you think the teachers in Parkland hadn't had those conversations already? I one hundred percent promise you they had, because that is what it means to be a teacher in America in 2018. More of us will have to do this, and it really could be any of us. Our kids are scared. On the west coast, thousands of miles from Parkland, my kids were not okay last week. Our kids are also angry, and they're ready to move, they're ready to act, and we're with them.

And if you love a teacher, it would actually help a great deal if you stood with us, because the burden is real and it is crushing. Say something. Anything.

Our national disgrace

I've been quiet here since winter break, mostly because I've been working on a writing project that has pulled me in another direction. But it seems school shootings hit a nerve with me, since I'm a teacher and a mother and I guess I have just the tiniest issue with the idea that our disgraceful country wins at mass shootings and not much else.

Maybe I'll add this blog as another project of its own: what would I end up with at the end of the year if I only post when America experiences a school shooting? (Will I have more entries than I posted in 2017? I only posted 18, a record low for me.)

There is, of course, much debate on what "counts" as a school shooting. Everytown for Gun Safety classifies it as any event in which a live firearm is discharged in a school building or on school grounds; that happens a lot. But if we "only" count those incidents in which a firearm kills or wounds someone in a school or on school grounds, during school hours, it's still way, way too many for a country that likes to brag about itself the way we do. And it's way too many for this mama, this teacher.

And after the latest massacre this week, even mere reports of gunfire have everyone here on edge. This morning my school chose to hold a surprise lockdown drill (I'm withholding comment on that for now). During that drill, we learned that gunfire had been reported on the campus of a local community college, where many of our students attend classes for Running Start. My students, held in a lockdown drill in our school, were texting their friends (also many of our students), held in a real lockdown. At that point, it didn't matter whether or not there was an actual shooter with intent to cause harm.

We are not okay.

Let me tell you about my morning, about how it felt to smooth my daughter's soft blonde hair away from her face and kiss her forehead as she called, "Dad, are you ready yet?" and glared at her watch. (He drops her off on the way to catch his bus, and my girl likes to be early.) Let me tell you about taking my son to his school on the way to my own, about reaching into the back seat to find his warm little hand, because for years now that has been our last good-bye in the morning -- before they jump out of the car and run into the gym for Morning Assembly I reach back and squeeze their hands three times. I (squeeze) love (squeeze) you (squeeze). Let me tell you about how it feels to hold those sensory images in my heart: my daughter's soft hair, my son's warm and slightly dry palm. Let me tell you about calling good-bye to one child as her dad drove her to school, about calling good-bye to the other as he jumped out of the car and ran into the gym, his backpack bouncing over his little butt, and the way I could just barely see the top of his Batman underwear peeking over the waistband of his jeans.

Let me tell you about my conscious thought: What if these were the last images of my children, alive? What if these moments were our last living memories?

I cried all the way to school. I listened to NPR. They read the names of all the victims who died in Parkland on Wednesday.

She was a soccer player and a creative writer. He unlocked a door to allow students in to hide from the shooter. She loved the beach. He had had just earned an academic scholarship to the University of Indianapolis. She was 14 and a member of the school marching band's winter guard. He reportedly died from wounds he sustained while shielding students from bullets.

"I sent her to school yesterday, and she was supposed to be safe...My job is to protect my children, and I sent my kid to school."

This is what it means to be a parent in America now. To live with that fear. Every fucking day, really.

And this is what it means to be a teacher in America: To understand that my students are scared, and the ways in which they process that are as varied as the students themselves. To cry with my colleagues every time this happens. Every. time. Do you have the vaguest idea what "every time" means? What is the number that means "fucking enough already"? Because we've done this so many times. And today we broke, at least at my school. We came to school shattered, and we were met with an unannounced lockdown drill. And then we heard about the real lockdown just up the road. And we tried to be calm for our kids but some of us were better at that than others, and when one of my kids brought me cookies he'd baked for me before lunch I couldn't keep the tears out of my eyes, and he just hugged me. And then kids came to eat lunch in my room and one of them was really, really not okay, and his friends told him to chill out, and then he was even less okay, and I couldn't make it better. And then some of my kids really just wanted "normal" by noon, so I tried to give them that, too. I don't think I did any of it particularly well. I taught with tears in my eyes all day long. I cried hard during my planning and once at lunch and twice in the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face. I cried hard after school, twice, before I walked to my car to drive home, trying to calm myself before I wrapped my own children in my arms.

And make no mistake: I was not the only teacher in tears today. And that's just in my school, three thousand miles away from Parkland, Florida. Ours weren't the only hearts breaking (again, fucking again) this week. I wasn't the only mother grieving and afraid as she kissed her children good-bye this morning.

And this is what I posted on Facebook this morning, before school, before I kissed my children good-bye, before our unannounced lockdown drill, before the lockdown at the nearby community college:

On President's Day, I will be making a donation to Everytown for Gun Safety.

I will give a specific dollar amount for:

Every friend or friend of a friend who comments that America doesn't have a gun problem (or any equivalent, like "America has a HEART problem" or "Cain killed Abel with a rock", etc.)

Every friend or friend of a friend who comments that teachers of our children should be armed

The top recipients of N.R.A. funding in the House and Senate
who have the gall to express thoughts/prayers/condolences to the victims of gun violence in schools

I have more ideas, but I fear I will run out of money.

I will be donating for every school shooting in America in 2018. And I'm furious about it.

I will never not be angry

I wonder: how many people who would rather see people murdered than vote for any kind of gun regulation at all, ever, are also "pro-life."

Probably most of them. What garbage that all is. (Like, guns are a right, but it's a privilege to access healthcare and services and help, yeah?)

And I wonder how many folks who "don't want to make it about guns" every time we have a mass shooting (Every. Time. We. Have. A. Mass. Shooting.) are also the same folks who wonder why everything "always has to be about race."

What a mess we are.

We don't need prayers. We need gun control. Have a nice day.

Someone I'm no longer friends with was angry with me after Sandy Hook for daring to bring up America's gun problem because it "wasn't the time" to talk about guns. She was "annoyed" that I was "making it all about guns."

She actually used the word annoyed.

But I see that a lot after every mass shooting. (God. "After every mass shooting." That's a thing. That's a thing we say.) I've been reading back through my blog and trying to count all the times I wrote, or tried to write, after a shooting. I should probably just add some sort of "another fucking mass shooting" tag, but all the entries sound the same. It's not changing or getting better and I'm totally, utterly hopeless that it ever will, because we allowed twenty children to be murdered in their classroom and still didn't change anything. My own children could be next. My husband. My students. Me. Anyone I love who ever leaves the damn house. So hey, folks who think it's "not the right time," can you please quick get it on the schedule sometime before the NEXT mass shooting? If we keep with this timeline, you have a few minutes, but not much more than that.

And if you don't think we should be talking about gun control, if you elevate your right to own guns over the right of folks to go to school or church or work or a concert or the public library or the park without someone shooting you, well, you know what you can do with your useless "thoughts and prayers."

I want a different America

I want to live in an America that loves its people as much as it loves its guns.

I want to live in an America that doesn't worship at the altar of guns.

I want to live in an America that doesn't just shrug and say, "Meh, what are you gonna do," after every mass shooting.

I want to live in an America where I don't just expect mass shootings.

I want to live in an America that doesn't just accept mass shootings.

I want to live in an America that cannot contain the phrase "after every mass shooting."

I want to live in an America where the guy on the radio can't begin a sentence with "Every time we see a mass shooting..."

I want to live in an America where churches, schools, concerts, clubs, coffee shops, offices, and workplaces are not targets for gun violence.

I want to live in an America in which elementary school children don't have to fucking practice active shooter lock-downs.

I want to live in an America where a man doesn't say to me, "Maybe if teachers aren't willing to arm themselves, they're not cut out to be teachers." (I want to live in an America where the idea of a teacher with a gun in a room filled with children sounds as insane as it is.)

I want to live in an America where my reality doesn't include a plan about what to do if a man with a gun comes for my classroom.

I want to live in an America where I don't say to my husband, "Of course it's my body between the gun and the kids. We protect kids first. That's our job."

I want to live in an America where I don't have to expect that the people who teach my children would also take a bullet for them.

I want to live in an America where the sight of a lone white man in a theater doesn't make me nearly stop breathing.

I want to live in an America that will call a white man a terrorist when he is a terrorist. I want an America where a terrorist's whiteness won't serve him with the label of a mentally ill lone wolf. I want to live in an America that doesn't push guns into his hands.

I want to live in an America that wakes up out of its complacency.

I want to live in an America that offers more than "thoughts and prayers."

On what’s not enough (or, feeling firmly stuck...)

Today we received Suzannah’s SBAC scores in the mail. The SBAC is the latest test, blah blah blah, and here is where I could engage in dialogue or debate about the test but I have zero desire to do that, for a billion reasons. Some of y’all People just make me tired, is why. And it’s Friday. I just typed and deleted and typed and deleted a lot of words about testing, but I am not here to write about testing, not really.

Full disclosure: Suzannah scored very well, if I’m reading it correctly (and I’m pretty sure I am). Well above the school, district, and state average. She also kind of enjoyed taking the test itself, which I love -- not at all because I care how she does on a standardized test, but because I feel it means we have been at least moderately successful in our endeavors to encourage her to try her best on whatever she’s doing but also have conveyed to her that no single test will tell us how smart, kind, capable, funny, or creative she is. She seems to enjoy tests as a fun challenge but doesn’t seem to worry about them much. She worries much more about whether or not Isaac has messed up her desk, or how the markers and paper are organized on our art supply table. (No, she did not get this from her father. She got lots of other cool things from him. The neurotic traits are all mine, I KNOW.)

Anyway, when the scores came she wanted to know how she did. I told her. She said, “Cool. That’s actually better than I thought I did.” But we didn’t make a big deal about it, because I didn’t make a big deal about when she took the test. And because I really, honestly, truly, could not care less. Here’s what I care about. Here’s what I want to celebrate. Adults who work at my children’s school have told me about seeing both of them stand up for other kids who were being picked on. Different adults, at different times. One teacher (not even Suzannah’s teacher) told me about how she walked up to a much bigger kid when he took something from a much smaller kid and demanded that he give it back. Isaac apparently stood up for one of his little buddies when another kid shoved him on the playground. That’s what I want to celebrate, that’s what I actually do care about, because that is not often the popular or easy choice, and I know that it won’t be the last time they’re faced with it. When I think about what I want to teach my children, what I desperately pray they learn from me, and from other good people in their lives, doesn’t have much to do with what goes on a test.

The world isn’t kind enough. It’s not an easy thing to each them. It’s not an easy thing to model. And frankly, when I take a good, hard look at myself, I find myself too often falling short. I lack patience and I yell too much and I am angry and I find it really difficult to extend grace to people who annoy or upset me. Not much of a model, am I?

It’s been a week like any other, really -- I had a really terrible day which left me wanting to stalk through the parking lot punching holes in everyone’s tires. I had a really sad day that left me crying at school (albeit briefly, and not in front of students). I had a really stressful, exhausting day that turned into a pretty satisfying day when I managed not to make a total ass of myself (or so my boss said) at a parent function I had to lead. I had a sad morning that turned into a surprisingly excellent day when a friend immediately cheered me up at school and my classes were absolutely fantastic. I had lovely late dinners with three different friends in one week, which is an unspeakable luxury. And now here we are on Friday, which is my time to sit and collapse with it all, collapse cozily, collapse gratefully, collapse in grief/anger/joy/fear/anxiety/relief. This is my time just to sit with it. To rage inwardly at all the “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!” bullshit posts that spring up after every damn shooting we experience, which will continue to spring up because we don’t do anything to stop it. To feel paralyzed with anger and grief and total helplessness, to listen to the President in his own exhausted grief and anger, to wonder when it will hit even closer because it will, because my God, twenty school children can be murdered in their classroom and one of my friends actually says she’s annoyed that people are “making this about guns,” that very same day and that was the day I stopped reading her Facebook in order to preserve any possible relationship with her but there are so many more, there was another this week, and one of my former students was right there in the middle of it, and there will be more and more and more and we know this and we don’t. Do. Anything. To stop it. There’s no reason it won’t be us next time because it could happen at my school or it could happen at my church, and oh, wait, five years ago it did, or it could happen at the damn mall, or it could happen in a movie theater, and there are people who actually believe a solution is to send me into my own goddamned classroom with a gun, and that is where I just have to stop typing all of this and walk away from the computer and breathe. We are broken. We are broken and this is so crazy I can’t even process it. It’s crazy and I am angry and I do not know how to see past that tonight. I’m all out of understanding for people who say intolerable things right now, which, I realize, isn’t what I want to model or teach my children. But tonight that’s where I’m firmly stuck.

The world isn’t kind enough. But kindness, frankly, isn’t enough. Nor, as Obama said, are thoughts and prayers. I don’t think think that’s what we’re short on.

I didn’t know I was going to write all that when I sat down; I rarely know what’s going to happen when I curl up to write these Friday night musings. Here, Internet -- you get my messiness. I keep my desk organized so I can hurl my thoughts at the keyboard and watch them splatter.