Several years ago my young son asked me, "How many more days until we die?"
It was bedtime and he was experiencing the pain and helplessness of grief for the first time.
Washington Post's On Parenting publication
To escape his question, I apologized and then lied to him. I said I couldn’t hear him, I wasn’t wearing my hearing aid, and I tried to distract him with his favorite lullaby so he could fall asleep. But when I wouldn’t answer his question, he raised his little voice way up, practically shouting so I’d have to hear him, and he begged me to tell him the truth. He wanted practical answers and wasn’t about to give up until he got some.
His need to hear the truth from someone he trusted outweighed my need to cushion him from it with a lie and a lullaby.
As I fumbled that night to explain how life and death and love works, in a way that my number-loving little boy could understand, it satisfied him for a while, and I felt like I became a better mother. I’d tuned in to my son in a way that I hadn’t before, and it resulted in our first conversation about what we can actively do to remember and honor those we love after they die.
Then on Valentine’s Day that same math and number-loving boy stepped off the school bus and surprised me with two red carnations and the other news of the day.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Mom! I love you so much. Did you hear about the school shooting today?”
On the bus ride home an older boy showed him the video that a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student posted on Snapchat while huddled in the corner of his classroom, the horrifying screams and sounds of war and gunfire blasting from the walls and doorway.
“I saw the video on the bus. It’s okay. It was just a few seconds long,” he said.
He has always measured the power of things by how many seconds, minutes, hours, days and years things last. But then he asked me this:
“Mom, how many kids died?”
I wanted to throw my hearing aid across the room and pretend I didn’t speak English. I wanted to pretend that I only spoke American Sign Language where the ASL sign for “shoot” and “dead” can look to the hearing-abled person like a game of charades or rock, paper, scissors – but this was no game. This is all too real and overwhelming, and for those few minutes as he stood there holding the carnations, I tried to stall the same way I’d done years ago, and I pretended I didn’t know the numbers. I pretended it was just another Valentine’s Day, and I took a long whiff of those sweet fluffy flowers, told him how much I love him, and asked him to put away his backpack. Then when he left the room I fell apart and pushed my burning eyes into the cool softness of his red carnations. I didn’t know how I’d ever be able to tell him the truth about the numbers, how much data I know about children who’ve been shot at school this year, last year, and all the previous years.
The day after the Parkland shooting, the New York Times published these numbers:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/15/us/school-shootings-sandy-hook-parkland.html
They came from the Gun Violence Archive, an organization that began tracking school shootings after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre: 239 school shootings nationwide, 438 people shot, 138 people killed. That’s an average of 40 school shootings a year since Sandy Hook, and an average rate of 23 people killed every year at school from gun violence.
I will never be able to accept what the numbers will do to my son’s beautiful mind and soul, but I know I must tell him the truth now and show him with actions, not just words, that there are steps we must take to end the number of shootings at schools. And I can no longer pretend that I don’t know the numbers. It’s my job as a parent to know them so that my child doesn’t become just another number and statistic.
It took me some time, but after hearing Emma Rodriguez, David Hogg, Alfonso Calderon, Delaney Tarr, Lorenzo Prado, Cameron Kasky, and so many other courageous Majory Stoneman Douglas teenagers, raise their voices to lead the way towards immediate change, because adults and politicians have consistently failed them, I finally had the courage to talk with my son about the number of deaths caused by gun violence.
These teenage survivors don’t care about politics -- they care about innocent lives. They only want to receive an education without the fear of being shot and killed by a military-grade assault weapon as they sit in their classrooms, cafeterias, football games, concerts, and churches. And they deserve action now. We cannot pretend we don’t hear their continual pleas for change or the overwhelming cries of all the children who’ve been murdered and silenced by an assault rifle over and over and over. Now is the time to keep listening with every single device we have to our youth in crisis, their teachers and parents, who remain on the front lines of what is now a war zone in our schools and country. And on March 24 my son and I will do just that. We will "March for Our Lives" alongside these brave teenage leaders, their parents and teachers, all the way up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C., and I’ll proudly wear my hearing aid so I don’t miss a word they say.
Comments