The Day After Uvalde

I grew up sheltered. I grew up in a home that was borderline fundamentalist, with evangelical roots. I am one of nine children, we were all homeschooled, and we moved about the country, nearly every year, to a new ministry opportunity until I was fourteen years old. My parents were motivated to homeschool us to protect us from the world, the scary world full of scary people. And so, I never stepped foot into an elementary school, middle school, or high school. I started college when I was fifteen years old. I skipped lots of milestones, the good ones and the not so good ones (so I’m told). My parents have their reasons, personal stories, and a hefty amount of trauma that informed their decisions for me and my siblings.

I am now thirty-six years old. A wife and mother to three children. I work in administration at an elementary school. I love everything about the buzz of happy students in the halls and class room traditions. A common tagline we use at school among the staff, faculty, and students is, “a safe school is a happy school.” This means whole child safety, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Our students are bustling through the building each day, excited to learn, partly, if not mostly, because they feel safe.

At the beginning this year our leadership team hosted a mandatory PD training on what to do in the event of an active shooter at school. We spent four hours over two days learning ways to block, hide, fight back, and plan for the unimaginable. I sat, absorbing the content, thinking to myself, “Surely we don’t need this. Surely I’d never need to use this information.” But then we watched a reenactment of a school shooting. We listened to the calls coming into the police once the shooting started. We sat and experienced a sliver of what it could be like and how to use what we know in the event it could happen to us, at our school. I started to feel sick and I wanted to leave. I was focusing on my breath, willing myself to stay in my chair. All of the sudden I found myself repeating the mantra in my head, “the world is not a scary place, the world is not a scary place.” After spending nearly two decades learning how to trust people within a world that I had little experience actually living in, the feelings of intense fear rushed back so quickly in this moment of dawning reality, “schools are dealing with this madness, teachers and kids are being trained to ward off unwarranted acts of war at their places of learning.” I cannot keep reading these headlines. I cannot live in a world where grocery shopping, attending a concert, going to church, going to school may mean an encounter with an active shooter. 

And here’s the deal, from my perspective it’s time for politicians to get creative. We cannot keep having the same arguments. We cannot keep villainizing opposite political parties, over generalized belief systems, being held in a stalemate of popularity or party approval with no actual change. I cannot bear it any longer. Human decency crosses every divide, and it doesn’t matter what any of us believes when we are the ones who lose a child to an active shooter. We are not one dimensional people. Humans are made to grow and change. I’m tired of living in a divided country with media outlets fueling the fire. I know too many people on both sides of the political spectrum that are smart, loving, viable human beings who care deeply about a variety of topics. It’s time to set some things down. It’s time to come together to work to redeem what has been lost and keep it from happening again, and again, and again. Can we please find a way?