It’s late Tuesday last week. All three of our kids are having a hard time winding down for the night.
It has been a summer of pushing bed times to extremes, of late evening yard games, late night movies and the eradication of routines. We are trying now to claw back some better habits, but it is not easy.
Our 11-year-old will start middle school the next morning. My wife and I could tell for a couple weeks that she was preparing meeting the moment with both excitement and nervousness, and when that happens she has a hard time falling asleep. Her hoped-for bedtime of 9:30 has long since passed. It’s almost 11.
Our 5-year-old had fallen asleep not that long ago. Both he and our 8-year-old have appointments to meet their new teachers — him for the start of kindergarten, her for third grade — the next day. School for them is right around the corner after Labor Day.
By the time my wife and I are winding down for our own sleep, it’s almost midnight. I need to be up in about six hours to do some work before helping our sixth grader get out the door and to the bus stop, a routine she will know how to handle soon on her own but has requested help with for now.
As I fall asleep, I’m having thoughts that are probably familiar to a lot of parents this time of year. Summer has been great. But it’s time for school. They need structure. We need structure. The kids need to be out of the house more and with their friends.
The next morning, I wake up our 11-year-old at around 7. She has to be to the bus stop in about an hour, which means we will spend the next 45 minutes at a fairly leisurely pace getting ready and then spend 10 frantic minutes on all the things we forgot.
We make it, and I snap the obligatory first day of school picture before she boards the bus. I walk back into the house and soon after log in again to prepare to finish that morning’s Daily Delivery podcast.
Then I see the news.
The early reports are a little bit all over the place, but the picture pretty quickly becomes clear: There has been an awful tragedy at Annunciation Catholic Church.
I try to compartmentalize it while the details are not yet fully known. Work on the podcast continues, with an odd bit of juxtaposition coming as the Vikings have made their own breaking news almost simultaneously by trading for Adam Thielen. I finish that day’s episode and record a segment for the next day’s show.
Then I allow myself to read and listen to more of what is known. There are two children, ages 10 and 8, dead. Many more are wounded. The shooter is dead, too. I have already been keeping my wife posted about developments in the story, but now I walk upstairs and tell her these confirmations.
It’s too much. I start sobbing, and so does she.
There are tragedies everywhere in the world every single day. The value of a life anywhere, any time, is the same.
This one did not happen to us, our family. Countless people are experiencing grief, anger and sadness that is countless times more raw and personal than ours.
We have the privilege of distance, of deciding how we will process this. Of how much vicarious trauma we will let in. Of whether we just keep on scrolling to the next story or really let it sink in.
But proximity and familiarity, whether we want to admit it or not, made this feel different.
I have been inside Annunciation, which is barely a mile away from where my wife and I used to live before we had kids, for pickup basketball games in the past. I know people who have attended school there. I know at least one person who had a child inside the church when the shooting happened.
Our two oldest children are very close in age to the two children who were shot and killed.
I cannot imagine it, but I also can imagine it.
Our middle-schooler hops off the bus after her first day, and as soon as she is far away enough from friends that we won’t embarrass her she is smothered in hugs and questions about how it all went.
She gives us the rundown and the highlights. We don’t bring up the tragedy at Annunciation, at least not yet. Part of it is I’m not sure what exactly to say or how much to say. Part of it is that all she really wants is to unplug for a while with some snacks in her quiet bedroom.
Later that evening after dinner, our 8-year-old and 5-year-old are getting a costume from the basement when we hear a loud scream and then hysterical crying. They rush upstairs and we learn from their words and blood that our 8-year-old accidentally slammed a door on her thumb.
It is bad enough that we make a quick decision to head to urgent care in case she needs stitches.
We arrive 15 minutes before closing time. The nurse and doctor seem both amused and flustered by her quirks as she tells the five minute version of the story of what happened instead of the five seconds (“I slammed my finger in a door”) that they needed.
They get her fixed up without stitches — just a strip to hold the cut in place, some gauze and a big wrap to protect a fingernail that is likely to fall off soon — and she is grateful.
It is drama that we definitely did not need at the end of the day, but it is minor. So minor. It will heal.
At bed time, our 11-year-old smiles and says that with all the drama of going to urgent care she couldn’t possibly go back to school for her second day.
I smile back. Nice try.
The sun comes up Thursday, as it always does. Our middle schooler gets on the bus. The whole day feels like an emotional roller coaster.
Our 11-year-old that evening mentions that they talked about the shooting at school Thursday, which we use as an entry point to talk a little more about it with all three kids.
I’m still not sure how much we should say. I have a belief that active shooter drills in schools do 1,000 times more harm than good, and I do not want our kids internalizing anxiety or giving in to a belief that the world is an inherently unsafe place.
I also know that I cannot give them assurances, which all parents want. I can only give them probabilities, and those probabilities feel more hollow when something so awful has happened so close and so recently.
“It is very, very, very, very, very unlikely that something like this will happen at your school” is my part of the messaging.
We catch the last real flickers of summer over a long weekend: fishing, a movie and plenty of sunshine in what seems like impossibly nice weather.
The kids are loud, demanding and great. They fight and they cooperate. They are relentlessly themselves.
I think about how quiet things will be Tuesday when all three of them get on a school bus — first full week of sixth grade, plus the start of third grade and kindergarten — and I feel a little guilty because I know it will be a relief.
I want to know that they’ll be safe no matter what.
I want to believe something like this will never happen again.
I want to hold them close but let them go.
What can be said about school shootings, about innocent children being killed or wounded? That our country needs to use more of our money to fund mental health services? That our country needs to have reasonable gun control? That our country needs to get people who promote violence and hatred of others out of positions of power? Yes, all of these directions need to be taken. And to do so, people have to actually vote to enact humane, positive rules/laws that strengthen our society. Talk is cheap; saying that school shootings are bad is not even close to enough. Don't let convicted felons, liars, politicians who only care about winning elections stay in office.