Fear.
The word itself is a little underwhelming for such a powerful emotion. It is the one who alerts us to danger. That can crush your chest and make it hard to breathe. That has your shirt sticky or you chasing sleep. Often, for such a powerful thing in a human’s life, I would think we could have come up with a name that wasn’t so simplistic.
Now, fear serves a huge purpose in keeping us alive. It is the thing that tell you there is danger, danger can harm you and to avoid it.
When I became a mother, fear became not just for myself, but for my children. Love had a weight to it suddenly. That the most important thing in my life was also very delicate, vulnerable, and new. The looming, anxious “what ifs” came in a way that surprised me and could bring me to my knees in bitter-sweetness. Yet, time passes, and you begin to have some trust in your ability to navigate it. You find yourself making mistakes, but also being string enough to mend them.
You find yourself accepting that the world is mostly good, but also filled with pain and danger. At some point you start teaching your child have to navigate it as best you can. And you begin to watch them navigate it as best they can.
My oldest is almost done with her first year of Middle School. It was strange year of fear as we are living through a pandemic that lead to life ending for a large amount of people, hospitals overwhelmed, and senseless to the loss of life. We came up with ways to safeguard us as we tried to figure out how to preserve life and its quality safely.
The truth is that joy this past year carried a little risk inherently in it. Finally, last month, our kids returned to a normal school day. There are masks and air flow rules and three feet spacing between desk with little barriers– but my kids are there and it has been so very, very good for them to be whole people.
Now, we were so focused on the pandemic, we forgot schools have a lot of pre-pandemic existing issues. Emotional regulation, bullying, navigating social relationships– and these kids are all out of practice.
Parents are bone-tired from duct taping our lives together and making choices that don’t have a lot of data to weigh and measure. We have had to take on other people’s worries and policies and limitations and this means you felt either more or much less safe as a result.
So it is natural when our town returned to school we looked mostly on it as a need that would fix the most pressing issues and hoped it would bring relief after the initial anxiety passed.
However, there was still preventable loss and pain, as we moved through reopening. We had issues navigating traffic with schools and jobs putting cars on the roads making it a Herculean feat to make to from one school building to the next. I felt that kink profoundly as some weird failure to be late to pick up my second grader simply because I had to pick up my middle schooler. It got better. It’s still hard, but I can make it by the skin of my teeth now and no one is left behind.
Yet, yesterday, on a a year of so much lost, a email dinged about a school threat today. Threat on social media that was sent to some students. Then information between parents circulated with the words “School Shooting,” Friday,” and “Snapchat.” Totally frightening in the most basic way. Because school should be the place you send children to be safe out of your care and somewhere years ago we lost that because a soul in pain plotted death on hallowed ground.
We’re afraid again. Afraid of other people, their decisions, and the harm we cause each other.
Sending your kid to be educated should not feel like a death march. Being an educator should not entail so much. They are expected to be social workers, educators, counselors, food security, liaisons’, and more working in the school system. They spend their days housed in a building filled with puberty, mental health crisis, and under developed brains make mistakes big and small. Then educators have their own burdens to navigate in a system where top down policies and requirements are made often out-of-touch policy makers who don’t understand the day-to-day business of the classroom. It is a lot.
Now, because my home has lived so long close to mental illness and pain and loss. Mostly because my Ex was dangerous and threatening for so long. I don’t hold that pit of fear of “maybe” the same way. I have marched my most precious thing in the world into the unknown again and again. I grew a family who lives close to it. We added another navigating another unsafe adult on an emotional scale to the mix that occasionally causes deep pain. I am used to the pit of fear in ways that make us decent at triaging risk. We don’t have a life without risk here– the kind where someone has just enough of a bad day and hurts another human, crosses a boundary on hallowed ground, make a scene, says terrible things, or grabs and balls up the straps of a backpack to stop a person leaving. We live a life where time with your child is not even a guarantee and we can be cut out of her life with ease. We live one foot in terrible things at all time.
I can’t offer a single guarantee that my kid will survive the school day today, but I feel like its safe enough to try. I feel like we talked about mental health, not panicking in a crisis, and how to be as safe as you can. We talked about taking care of others and confessing secrets if they keep your classmates from harm.
I feel like this is the game of telephone and mired in it is misguidance. I hope we set a boundary, a consequence, and some help for the first person who started it.
I hope I make the right choice today. I hope we don’t have to make this choice again and again and again. The youngest hasn’t even started yet. We have twelve more full years ahead of us. I hope we fix it for her if not for my oldest. For all the parents who’ve lost already and all the ones afraid. I hope we stop hurting each other this way. I hope we learn from our mistakes.
And more than hope, we talk about all the things. And more than talking, we plan for the things. And more than planning, we try to remember we belong to each other and all the complications that entails. And we try to teach our kids not to trespass on the hallowed ground of other people’s hearts, their safety, and their identity because we should respect that limit.
So today is hard and a little scary, but we are going to show up anyway. And maybe take a few deep breaths until the school days passes.
Love, Mom 