I wrote this the day after the horrors of Ulvade but I didn’t hit publish. But today, on a sunny brilliant day when I had the joy of dropping off my 10-year old to school and the news cycle is predictability moving away, I feel compelled to put it out into the world.
Ten. Most of the babies were ten years old.
My baby is ten. Is that why I can’t breathe today? Or is it simply because as a mother, a citizen, a human, I can’t fathom the slaughtering of ten-year olds in a modern, advanced society.
That we look upon the atrocities in Ukraine and Afghanistan and countless other places and say, not here and go about our days.
But yes here. Always here. And it seems: evermore here.
Ten. They were eight and nine and ten. Babies that had learned to ride bikes under the hot sun. Sat giggling at the dinner table, telling a story about school. Helped color with their younger siblings. Cuddled in with their older siblings on the couch. Celebrated with their family, the turn into young adulthood - with grown up dresses and shirts and shoes.
Now those dresses will stay hanging in those closets forever. No hands with the last vestiges of chubby baby fat to reach up and pull it off the hanger. To leave it frustratingly in a heap on the floor. To twirl innocently in their last years of true childhood.
We say we value life. That we’ll go to the ends of the earth to protect a life from its cellular beginning. But what of the lives already being lived? What of our duty to them?
Ten. You can count the years lived on two hands. Stingy, measly ten that parents got to live and love with the pieces of their heart that walked outside of their body.
And now those pieces are gone. And the heart will never be the same.
I can’t see the pictures of these babies. Of their parents …. Anguish? Devastation? Destruction? What word in this language or any language do we give for this feeling?
This is not a tragedy. Tragedies are born of events we cannot control.
This is a choice. We choose to let our babies learn active shooter drills over a false debate of freedom. This has never been about no guns (though for my money, I’d be happy for that to be the case). It should be about which guns for whom and for what purpose. I say this as a Canadian mama of American babies, where in Canada guns are used for hunting and “sport” and yes, “self-defense”. But never do I have to ask another mama if they have guns in the house before I send over my kids for a play date. Or do I worry if road rage will turn into something far worse.
Yes, I will always live in fear of the unthinkable happening because, well, I’m a parent and nothing in life is guaranteed. Tragedy strikes us all in our ways.
Ten. I can see their baby faces when I close my eyes. Taken for their school pictures or at birthday parties or just on a Tuesday night.
Only their loved ones will know the stories behind these pictures. What we see as the outsiders is just that: a moment frozen in time, outside of any of the big, gorgeous, colorful life lived by these kids. The dreams they had. Their parents had. Their communities had.
Frozen in time forever because we don’t have the guts and the will to keep our babies safe. And at the end of the day, we are a nation run by markets and men. Where gun stocks are up today because people’s response to this was not to hand in their guns in disgust but to go buy more. Where our country is locked in debate about a woman’s right to choose the parameters of her life but not about the parameters of the child’s care and life borne into this country.
Ten. My baby is ten. She has a dazzling smile. It radiates up through her body and shines out of her eyes. We celebrated her and her first decade just a few short months ago. We celebrate her friends as they too in turn, cross this milestone. At this moment, they all sit clustered around tables in a beautiful classroom. Joyful and rambunctious and full of everything good. I cannot fathom a world where that classroom turns into carnage. I can not.
I write this not because I think it will change anything. I think that if Sandy Hook couldn’t change anything, that this will, where it was mostly poor brown kids slaughtered.
I write this because I cannot breathe. I cannot do what I need to do as a mother, a citizen, a human this morning because there is no place for this rage, this grief, this devastation to go.
Ten. They were ten. They will forever be ten. They will only get to be ten.