Girl Scouts, Guns, and Haircuts
It’s 7:43 at night and Rowan just woke up from a two-hour long nap. He’s standing in the kitchen saying, “No. No go to bedtime. No, no go to bedtime.”
It may not be quite the end of the weekend I had hoped for, but the rest of it has been surprisingly ok. Certainly better than my anxiety freak out from last Saturday. There have been moments, but there are always moments. I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to accept that.
Zach has a friend who moved into the area last year and Friday they invited us over to dinner. Taking Rowan into a house of people with no children is nervewracking because his nickname for the moment is Rowan the Destroyer. He’s like a very antagonistic cat — when he gets angry he purposely swipes everything off of the surfaces around him. The more breakable, the better. Luckily, they had just moved in, so their house was not full of the fancy things that I assume all childfree people have. No delicate glass figurines and Faberge eggs and whatnot. I don’t know, the pre-kids era is basically a blur to me at this point.
The weather yesterday was gross, so I hibernated to the best of my ability. I’m still white knuckling it until spring. I’ve temporarily (mostly) given up the guilt of letting the kids watch TV all day on days when I know it might save my sanity.
We did take the kids for haircuts. Rowan screamed like a banshee and thrashed around while sitting in my lap. It’s a little frightening to have a woman with scissors trying to cut your kid’s hair while he is being crazy. Finally, a lollipop saved the day.
Today, I suffered through a Girl Scout cookie booth. The idea of small talk with people I barely know, while trying to parent my kid who is refusing to participate, is my own personal hell. I basically sign her up for booths where the moms I know well are already signed up.
Then, a friend and I went to have a Sunday afternoon beer at this little bar I recently discovered. I need more of that in my life. This place has lots of windows letting in light and comfy chairs for lounging and chatting and writing. She was going to read and I was going to write, but we ended up just talking for an hour.
In between all this regular up-and-down drudgery of life, I’ve been tilting at the windmills of Facebook comment sections.
I feel like it is sometimes difficult to straddle both sides of the mental health/gun control discussion.
Do we need mental health care reform? Absofuckinglutely.
Do we need gun control reform? Absofuckinglutely.
Do the two have a whole hell of a lot of connection? Not really.
The biggest connection would be the potential for mentally ill people to take their own lives, not the lives of others. And certainly not the lives of multiple others on a mass murder scale.
Outside of that, they are two distinct issues. And constantly trying to combine them just furthers the stigma of mental illness and yet does nothing to stem the increasing rate of mass murder.
The two are not mutually exclusive nor are they mutually inclusive.
And yet, every time this happens (I wish that wasn’t something I had to type), the memes about the need for improved mental health care start flying. And it’s difficult because you don’t want to rail against improvements in that arena but you don’t want to pretend like that is going to fix the issue of white dudes shooting for a body count.
I think sometimes, it’s easy to point to mental health because you want to believe that anybody who would do this must be crazy, because the alternative is uncomfortable to comprehend. We all want to distance ourselves from this reality in as many ways as we can.
I get it. When Chelsea messaged me Wednesday night to say that there were 17 dead kids (and adults), my first thought was, “please don’t let them be elementary school kids.”
It was not, “please let it not be true.” Because of course it was true. I just wanted it to have as many degrees of separation from me as possible.
All of these people who care more about their fucking rifles than dead children are so willfully ignorant that it hits all the “that’s not logical!” buttons in my brain. And arming teachers is such bullshit that I can’t comprehend it. I keep starting to type out reasons why it would go so horribly wrong, but either you get it or you don’t.
It’s all so nuanced. I am, however, pretty sure that shitty parenting and lack of spankings is not the issue. Looking at you, family of my friends and all the random comment people. It also has nothing to do with God not being allowed in the classroom (nobody ever kicked him out). None of this is the issue.
Guns. Guns are the issue.
If gun laws were far more strict, and certain guns and accessories were banned, would that completely solve the problems? No, of course not. Obviously, there would still be people who did terrible things. But we don’t forgo all medicine just because some people die of disease. We do our very best to lower the body count.
And yes, it would take time. I compare it to planting blueberries. For years, I wanted to plant a blueberry bush, but was annoyed because it takes several years before you actually get any edible berries. And I’m impatient and I wanted all the berries right then! I didn’t want to wait! And in the meantime, years went by without me having any homegrown blueberries, and if I had just planted them when I first thought of it, I would be totally eating pie right now.
Except instead of blueberries it’s not-dead children.
And the results are intangible in some ways, because it’s difficult to prove a negative. You don’t know how many children were saved by any given effort. And not just children, though kids are the population that garner the most outrage.
The other day at work I had to sit through a very long active shooter presentation and discussion. We all spent time thinking how we would react if we were in various places in our building. How would we get our (adult) students to safety? What could be used as a weapon? When is it appropriate to call the police — just how risky does a potential risk have to seem? If a random person comes into the building while I’m at the front desk, how much should I fear for my life before I hit the panic button without getting in trouble for overreacting?
Columbine was April 20, 1999. My last day of high school (and also my birthday) was May 19, 1999. I did not have time to experience the shift that started at that point and continues to this day. We never had lockdown drills. My daughter’s elementary school has had an actual lockdown. When my mom was visiting and Lorelei showed her around the school she said, with complete nonchalance, “the windows are still covered from the lockdown.”
My friends and I are having to consider when to talk to our kids in more detail about what you do if someone with a gun is in your school and you are somewhere outside of your classroom. I love fostering critical thinking skills in my kids… but not like this.
To them, it’s just regular life. Nothing to see here. Move along.
It’s now 9:37 9:59 and Rowan is still awake. Lorelei screamed and whined at me that I wouldn’t order her special shoes to wear for a one-time event — then she finally fell asleep. Sometimes parenting sucks. Not being able to keep them safe, though, that sucks even more.
I remember watching Channel One (did y’all have that?) after Columbine amd my teacher said “Y’all better be glad you’re almost done with school. It’s never going to be the same after this.” How right he was…