Ya’ll, I have done not a lick of work today – besides preparing a filing that must go out, which is the only reason I’m still here and not swooping in to pick up my children this very minute. (Yes, even though they say they hate me and I say they annoy the bloody heck out of me. Love and annoyance coexist in every parent’s heart, I’m here to tell you, and I love their annoying little selves all the fiercer on crappy days like this.)
I have said what I want to say on guns before. But I’m having trouble processing this latest tragedy – the third since I posted about Aurora, by the way (Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the Portland mall earlier this week). Here’s why. Once I had a child, something kind of amazing happened to my imagination. It became more vivid than before, and less under my control. (I’ve also written before about my (minor, manageable) struggles with maternal anxiety.) Although time and experience have helped, my mind is still susceptible to horrid images of my children’s untimely end. I believe that’s what we call evolutionary protection of the species, folks, and it is because of that that I check the bathroom, every single night, for plugged in electronics before plopping my kids in the tub. I watch for out of control semis in my rearview mirror every time I brake, even a little bit. Whenever those boys cough, I race to their sides to assure they are not choking to death. And when they have a fever – what’s up, WebMD, allow me to diagnose my child with every deadly disease in your listings and lose my sanity one hyperlink at a time.
So when a masked adult man walks into a classroom full of children my child’s age, I lose my ability to control my imagination. I picture what it would have been like to be a fly on the wall in that room. (I just wrote out everything I saw in my mind’s eye, described every gory minute, and then deleted it because I never want to read that again and trust me, dear reader, you don’t either. It helped with the processing to write it out, though, to purge my brain of those words.) My mind races from one terrifying image to another, and my body undergoes a literal stress reaction in response to my imagined stress, and I search news sites compulsively, for what I don’t know – perhaps confirmation of the obvious, that my kid isn’t among the dead, and neither am I.