"Wait until you become a parent."
You hear that all the time growing up. I always sort of heard it like I would hear; "Wait until you take Organic Chemistry," one of those things that simply changes the way you look at something, something that you'll never quite appreciate until you get there. And that's that.
Then, you have a child.
It isn't so much that you change, or how you look at things change, it's that the world around you changes, instantly. Things that once surrounded your life now play a role in your life: diapers, formula, soccer practice and schools.
If you are an adult over a certain age, maybe forty,"school" in the United States - and only the United States - became inseparable from "shootings" a while ago, at least as much as "classes," "homework," "football" and "dances." It can be near impossible to separate "school" from the other, at least for a parent.
Every single time I drop my daughter off at school it's there, at least in the distant recesses of the mind. That's the real thing that they don't tell you about being a parent. You can't hear about kids getting hurt, anyone's kids, without it hurting you. When you become a parent, it is not that you "see" things differently, you live differently.
No one can "protect" their child from everything. Someone's child will get hurt today in a car accident. But, I am in the car with my child. There's something about that "control" of her environment that makes me hyper-aware, and also sure that whatever can be done, will be done. I don't get that feeling when I drop her off out of the car. Especially at school.
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School should be the safest place my child can go outside our home. Instead, at times it feels like the single most dangerous. I have often asked myself; Which do I feel less sure about, which is less safe, school or the mall? I don't know.
I know a couple of things.
I know that schools are much better nowadays about their own hyper-awareness. I haven't met a teacher or principal that I didn't know would do everything in their power to keep my child safe, and I know that matters, deeply. I know that every door in a school is locked nowadays except for maybe - maybe - one in the front, and that used to bother me, no more. I know that all these fucking shootings lead to head scratching, questions, and anger. Some people believe that the way to make school safer for my child is to add more guns to the school environment. I know that can't be right, unless you're a gun manufacturer.
I know that in any other endeavor, fire safety, airplanes, cars, when there is a deadly hazard, a problem that just keeps happening - twelve this year and it is only Valentines Day, our kids are dying - any normal place with people concerned about keeping the kids alive, would look to somewhere else. Where do kids go to school without the fear of an "active shooter"? If twelve planes had fallen out of the sky this year, twelve buses gone off the road, we would take answers from anywhere and have demanded them last week.
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I know we can't do that in the United States but I don't know why. I don't understand why the United States can have such wonderful safety engineers that no parent worries about a fire at school, even though these schools have chemistry labs within them. None of us worry about the school burning down.
We worry about gunfire at school and we worry more each year. We worry so much it hurts, but not like they hurt in Parkland tonight. We all wonder which of us will hurt that way later this week and next. What about March? It's the United States, after all, and it's only February. And, I know we never do anything, even though we're supposed to be the grown-ups.
A lot of kids will get hugged tonight with a connection that they cannot yet understand. Some things can't be understood until one becomes a parent.
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Originally blogged at The Trump Impeachment
My Stuff.
*I’m just not in the mood to talk about the politics of it now.