Especially Your Own Child

Written after Uvalde

*I shared this post a year ago on my social media platforms. I had intended to share a different piece in my Substack this week, but in light of the school shooting in Nashville, this feels like the piece to share. Love you all.

Yesterday, after the news of the shooting at Robb Elementary, I called my youngest son for purely selfish reasons. I needed to hear your voice,” I said crying. In my many years as a single mother, in the following years as a Brady Bunch, and always as someone with clinical depression, I have been very careful with my tears. Resisting enmeshment, I often differentiated for my children, “Mommy is sad. It may not feel good that Mommy is sad, but it’s my sadness. You have your own feelings.” I made sure they didn’t feel like the burden to help Mommy fell on their shoulders. “Thank you for the hugs. It’s true, Mommy is sad. But sadness is okay and I have Grandma, and Aunt Dee Dee, and all my friends to help me if I need them so you don’t need to worry.” My feelings were always authentic, but also strategically visible for the boys’ benefit. That is to say that as much as I could, I controlled how far I opened the window and let them see my feelings. I wanted to raise emotionally intelligent humans, but I didn’t want to have children that felt unsafe or anxious because my feelings were too often on display. 

And then yesterday, without really thinking, I called Jake for me. For the first time, I needed something from him. And now I feel weird. Guilty. Yes, he’s nineteen now, not nine, but I’m the parent. And I know he’s already overwhelmed by the daunting state of the world he will navigate as an adult: school shootings and climate change and pandemic and war. I know he struggles with his own depression, in part thanks to me and the genes I’ve given him. I wonder how he felt when he answered the phone yesterday and heard me crying on the other end. Was I transmitting my fear of ever losing him or the enormity of my love for him? Was he worrying about me, or did he feel mature, proud that I believed he could handle the intensity of the moment. Because he is strong and wise and because we’ve had almost two decades of laughing hard together, occasionally crying just as hard. 

Maybe the impulse to call him was more than needing to hear my child’s voice amid the horror of dead school children. The thing is, Jake went to elementary school where I taught for over ten years. His second grade classroom was across the hall from the second grade classroom where I taught many of his friends–friends he still has. I was the teacher his teacher asked to watch her class when she had to take a vomiting student to the nurse–only to find out it was my vomiting child and I owed her a new pair of clogs. Jake and I had active shooter drills across the hall from one another, when his teacher and I covered the windows in black butcher paper, flipped the light switches, locked the doors, and then huddled in a corner with 25 seven year olds. When unplanned lock-downs were announced on the loudspeaker, I knew he was near–though never near enough. Elementary school was something he and I shared. Something, now that he’s grown and I’m no longer teaching, we made it through unharmed. And something that should never have been a threat in the first place.

There is unbearable grief in the world today, shattered worlds and shattered hearts, shattered illusions of our babies safe on the rug listening to read aloud. And maybe, in that context, it’s okay to reach for anyone for comfort, even your own child. Or perhaps, especially your own child.