On the afternoon of April 20, 1999, my mom was driving me to an after-school activity when she told me, “I have to talk to you about something.”
I was in eighth grade. Old enough to know when someone waits for a quiet moment to say, I have to talk to you about something, it’s not good news. I glanced to her from the passenger seat of her gray Subaru station wagon and waited.
I still recall today the exact piece of road we traveled as she told me earlier that day, two students had entered their school in Columbine, Colorado with guns and killed thirteen people.
We didn’t really talk about it. I’m sure my mom told me I could ask her anything, talk to her if I wanted to. I’m equally sure I did not ask questions. She told me the blunt truth of what had happened, and I quietly digested it.
Now, as an adult, I know she told me in the car because people would be talking about it wherever we went. She was about to drop me off in a place where she couldn’t control what was said, or how. If she said nothing, the story in my mind would become what others made it. She would leave me adrift to synthesize with my fourteen-year-old brain something she found too incomprehensible, too awful, to speak aloud.
Instead, her words allowed the story to take root from a place of safety. Of truth.
At the time, I could not have understood what this cost her.
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This morning, before my son left for school, I told him, “I have to talk to you about something.” Yesterday, someone walked into an elementary school and killed nineteen children and their teacher.
He is nine years old, just like many of them.
I recently read Melissa Fobos’ Body Work, a short but powerful book about writing from personal experience. Fobos writes at length about trauma, about writing the unspeakable. Her words came back to me as I felt acutely my unpreparedness to speak this story aloud. My arms and legs trembled. My stomach felt heavy beneath my heart.
But I told him, not because I could help him make sense of such a thing — I couldn’t, just like my own mother couldn’t — but because I wanted to be beside him when he heard the words for the first time. I wanted him to know I would be brave enough to speak about this, and by extension brave enough to hear any story he could ever tell me, any question he could ever want to ask. This was my responsibility to him, even if every word felt wrong.
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Sitting at the table with my child this morning, watching him eat breakfast in his almost-too-small Pokemon pajamas, my overwhelming instinct was to shield him from this.
I was angry. Angry we live in a world where I have to tell my child of this horror not a week after a man walked into a supermarket and shot ten people simply because they were Black. My child, who loves pictures of cute animals with big eyes, who traces hearts and peace signs and smiley faces in the fog on the mirror after his shower, who once found it unbearably sad to learn annual plants die after they flower and reproduce.
How many times did my mother feel this same sorrow, this same anger at a world she could not protect me from? I imagine she will feel it today, reading these words and knowing I have felt it too. And yet every time she could, she stood beside me, if not to make the news bearable, at least to let me know we were bearing it together. Living the same story.
I remember her at the kitchen table when Channel Six played the video of Rodney King’s beating on the evening news. She did not shy away from telling me what I had witnessed, did not think me too young to know what racism was or what it could make of us.
I remember the summer I was seventeen, when a classmate died in a car crash less than two miles from our house. I was away on a camping trip when it happened. The morning after I returned, Mom caught me before I had a chance to sift through the newspapers on the table. Before I could run across the article with the grainy photo of my friend’s mangled Jetta.
“I’m sorry,” she told me. “She didn’t make it.” I stood in stunned silence at the bottom of the basement stairs. A moment later, the phone rang, and I excused myself to answer it. It was my boyfriend, who’d been with me on the trip. His mother had just told him, too.
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As a writer, I think a lot about when information is revealed in a story, how, and by whom. This sets the course of the pages to follow as much as the revelation itself. It literally determines the kind of story we experience.
My mother knew this, and she passed the knowledge on to me. Even if we feel we cannot bear the burden of breathing this story into existence for the people we most want to project, bear it we must. Mom never told me what to think about the heaviest things, at least not in so many words, but in a way she did. She taught me the importance of truth, and she taught me we are safer when we speak it clearly than when we try to protect each other from it.
I hugged my son an extra time before he left for school this morning, full of sorrow for the world I had to teach him to know. A horror writer friend once told me he uses fiction to process his worst fears. After becoming a parent he wrote several chilling stories of young children being possessed or stolen. These are the unspeakable stories, the nightmares we might try to process on the page in hopes we never have to speak them aloud. But in some way most of us will, and do.
I can’t write this one into making sense. I want to. Those precious souls deserve justice. They deserve peace. This chapter in our national story is unpublishable. The failures of justice are too protracted, the true villains too long without a counterweight. I know this, and yet I feel powerless to revise it. All I can do is control how it first appears on the pages of my child’s memory, and in so doing, give myself to him as a safe repository for the stories none of us should have to tell.
It is a lot. It is a trauma I absorb into my body, to stay there like a splinter. And still, it doesn’t feel like enough.
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