If we had left the house a minute earlier. If he hadn't gone off to fetch the soccer ball instead of getting in the car. If I had sped down the dirt road instead of slowing to take the icy stretch slower. We neared the intersection, that one by the entrance to the interstate that they put in a few years back. The one that makes me roll my eyes (why divert the on-ramp through a stop light? If they left it the old way, we could enter the freeway faster). The stoplight switched to green with plenty of time for our approach. I remembered how my husband laughed last night that he'd timed the light perfectly yesterday morning on the school drive and soared right through without slowing. "That never happens!" I should see how fast I'm going, I thought as we neared the intersection. To make him laugh if I ended up doing the same. Then suddenly, twenty feet in front of us, a car from oncoming traffic whizzed through its red light. Twenty feet from T-boning our … [Read more...] about the day we almost got hit
gun violence
I have a first-grader
Every morning my son goes off to school. He slings a giant shark backpack over his tiny shoulder, and he waves to me as I drive away from the carpool lane. And every morning as he turns into the school's open door, the same fear catches my heart. What if that is the last time I see him? This is not a normal response, I know. But it is not normal to live in a land where a man murders a classroom of first-graders. And then we do nothing to prevent this from happening again. It is not normal to live in a land where I need to sit through a safety training, as an employee of a university, to learn what to do in "an active shooter scenario" on campus. It is not normal to live in a land where my husband lays today's newspaper face down on the kitchen counter so the kids cannot read the headlines or see the photos. The latest version of the same school shooting horror we watch unfold every few months. I have a first-grader. Sandy Hook stares me in the face every single time … [Read more...] about I have a first-grader
o come, be born in us
Yesterday the O-antiphons of Advent began. But mine started early, driving home last Friday on a snowy freeway, catching the afternoon news after a day of meetings. Oh God, no. Oh God, not again. Oh God, not children. So many words have been spilled since Friday, and yet I keep struggling to voice how deeply this news wounds. As a mother, of course. But deeper, as a person of faith who tries to make sense of God's ways, who wonders how we can respond in turn. It was the familiarity of Sandy Hook that shook me up. The day before the shooting, a school was bombed in Syria, killing sixteen, half of whom were women and children. But that tragedy was a mere blip on the evening news, the daily digest of the continued slaughter of the innocents. My husband mentioned it over dinner and I shook my head. "I can't handle Syria anymore. Too much. I can't handle it." But now, school heaped upon school, bodies heaped upon bodies, babies heaped upon babies, I keep thinking of Sandy Hook and I … [Read more...] about o come, be born in us
the sheer aliveness of tonight
My children seemed even smaller today, even more fragile and fleeting. The whole day shifted, slanted towards helpless with the news from Newtown. Everything felt ugly and overwhelming and exhausting, like being punched in the chest, the core of my heart. What to say or do or think in the face of horror, of violence wrenched upon a corner of the world, so much like our quiet own, ripped inside out and left bleeding and broken and raw beyond recognition? The second I got home, I gathered my boys in my arms, smothered their hair with my kisses. Tried to breathe in the simple fact of their existence before they squirmed away. Before they went back to laughing, playing, whining, reading. Being. For the rest of the day I watched them with other eyes. I watched them from the corner of the kitchen over dinner. From the bedroom doorway during bathtime. From the top of the stairs while they giggled under the Christmas tree. I lingered on the normalcy of our night, the ordinary … [Read more...] about the sheer aliveness of tonight
