Earlier in the week I wrote about the lock down at my daughter’s school. SSCPS in Norwell, on Monday.
In fact, an edited version of my blog piece will appear in Globe South on Sunday. Everyone remains safe and fine. Nothing more is known now about the shell casing that was found at school that prompted the precautionary lock down. As a parent, I’m so glad fear was the worst thing we experienced this week.
Those stabbed and traumatized at the high school in PA were not so lucky.
Saying little and shaking my head is what I do more and more of when I hear the news. Is the world changing? The news? Or both?
I do not understand how and when schools assess safety and danger. I do not envy school staff, teachers and administrators or law enforcement. Or parents. And most of all the students who seem desensitized by news clips of tragedy.
It’s easy to wonder why wasn’t more done when something bad happens. In a school or a family and for an individual.
It is also easy to wonder, when nothing bad happens, if people over-react, do unnecessary searches of student property on school premises and spend untold thousands having police officers and dogs on public school property for hours. I don’t have any answers.
Reading more about safety protocols, who and how they are established and enforced and how effective they are or are not is some of what I’ll be thinking about.
Thinking about mental health services for the young. That too. I’ll be looking up actual crime statistics today as opposed to fifty years ago? Do we hear more? Is the violence more deadly?
I need more facts to keep my fear in check but also because I want to better understand the world as it is experienced by our children.
But I won’t be doing any of that research today. I’ll be getting the frozen yogurt after school I wanted to take my daughter to on Monday, seeing a group of friends this evening and hopefully enjoying some spring weather this weekend.
My friend Heidi called me her lock down buddy the other day. I’m thinking of the mothers I stood with in the parking lot on Monday, on the street outside my daughter’s school, who I spoke with on the phone or texted later. I’m thinking of the parents I sat with in an auditorium. I’m grateful for that in person support and community.
When the s*%! hits the fan, or even aims for it and misses, you need those people you stand shoulder to shoulder with.
So, today, the free-write:
I Stand Shoulder to Shoulder With…..
As always, write without lifting pen off paper (or fingertips from keyboard). Don’t think too much or edit or worry about punctuation or grammar. The writing is for you.
Share it online or personally if you are so included. What’s most important is that you write.
Go!
You Matter Mantras
- Trauma sucks. You don't.
- Write to express not to impress.
- It's not trauma informed if it's not informed by trauma survivors.
- Breathing isn't optional.
You Are Invited Too & To:
- Heal Write Now on Facebook
- Parenting with ACEs at the ACEsConectionNetwork
- The #FacesOfPTSD campaign.
- When I'm not post-traumatically pissed or stressed I try to Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest.
I stand shoulder to shoulder with myself and in the past, that’s all I had, or so I felt. But now I realize that there’s a larger, greater support, a teacher of sorts, who stands with me when I need it the most. And I am grateful, because I have not always felt that way. In fact, for most of my life, I have felt alone.
Theodore Roethke wrote:
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade…
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?
Ahhh, the nobility. In what ways have we remained strong, refused to cry, opposed our violent perpetrators? Demonstrated the utmost decorum in proving we, too, were as noble. Despite our circumstances. In light of the inner conflicts we felt while standing shoulder to shoulder with the very people who were oppressing us. The many masks we wore in order to fit in to a situation or circumstance or entire world that felt foreign to us or even worse, polluted and toxic, a sewage plant of sins that only we could see.
Yet, when the grey turned to black and we could no longer see an inch in front of our faces, what magnificence emerged? What arm did you find yourself linked to? What light did you find? Was it not the inner glow of your own soul? Your own shoulder? The emergence of a few, like-minded shoulders whom you may never have noticed before? Visions of backs and backsides leaving, but new faces, oh the new faces. So many new faces coming towards us from the darkness.
And perhaps not forever, because over time, the people who stand by us change. Some leave and in doing so leave large, gaping holes from which we must catch our breadth. But others emerge and some of those do stay. And those are the anchors. Those are the shoulders we lean on, who don’t mind our spit and snot leaving stains. Those are our soul-sisters and brothers whose shoulders hold us up when we can no longer hold ourselves at all. Those are the people who are woven indelibly into the fabric of our life’s tapestries and no matter the length of time they are with us, we are forever changed.
The others, we forgive them, because it’s not their fault. And in doing so, we learn to forgive ourselves, because it’s not our fault either.
Jen,
I love this:
“Yet, when the grey turned to black and we could no longer see an inch in front of our faces, what magnificence emerged? What arm did you find yourself linked to? What light did you find? Was it not the inner glow of your own soul? Your own shoulder? The emergence of a few, like-minded shoulders whom you may never have noticed before? Visions of backs and backsides leaving, but new faces, oh the new faces. So many new faces coming towards us from the darkness.”
I also love anchors capable of bearing snot and spit and life and grit. It makes me think of the changing anchors I have had but that there are always anchors (maybe books, people, pets).
This is beautiful writing!
Cissy