I Don't Know What to Do With That

I have been wrapped up in kid world. School started last month and it has been dance, 4H, and birthday parties. I have been slammed, and have wished to return to the slow mornings of summer.

Then something terrible happened, and it didn’t just ask me to pause. It forced me into complete stillness.

There was a shooting at an elementary school on Thursday. The first elementary school shooting in our state, and just one town over from where I take my kids to school every single day.

I knew families that went to that school. I could feel their panic from a distance as they waited to find out what had happened to their children.

This feels especially alive for me because when we were moving our family, we had the option to live where we are now or where the shooting occurred. My kids could have been in that school if we made one single different decision. That is a hard thing to sit with. The what ifs come without permission.

Then there’s realizing that my kids are the same ages as the kids that were lost. Kids that don’t get to come home. Families that didn’t know this would be their last interaction.

That guts me every time. I think about those families, and I think about our mornings. The ones where we’re rushing, where I lose my patience, where we say things we don’t mean and assume we’ll make it right when they get home.

We live as though there will be another chance. Another afternoon, another bedtime, another morning to try again.

And I don’t know how to process the fact that, for those families, there won’t be.

I keep playing it on a loop: These are babies. Your babies, my babies, it doesn’t matter whose. We want to protect all of them.

I have always been uneasy about sending my kids to school. Not in a paranoid way, just always uneasy. So we chose carefully. A smaller school, a small community, locked doors. Because school shootings don’t happen at small schools, right? That’s a big city problem, surely.

But Thursday’s shooting happened at a small school. A small community. Locked doors… Same as ours.

The district closed Friday and will remain closed. Neighboring schools had police presence. But how long do you close for five lives lost? How long does it take before a family feels safe walking back through those doors?

They say lightning doesn’t strike twice, but you sure as hell don’t stand on a hill in a lightning storm anymore either. You’ve learned your lesson.

So the only alternative I can see is to keep them home. But that doesn’t necessarily make sense either.

For my family, I have been quietly turning this over long before Thursday. The idea of something different. A microschool, a farm co-op, something that feels more like ours. It wasn’t urgent. It was just a thought I kept coming back to and then setting down.

And now I don’t know if Thursday is the reason I’m thinking more seriously about it, or if it gave me the urgency to actually explore it more.

That’s what I keep getting stuck on. Shouldn’t I be allowed to make a life-changing decision for my family without fear being the thing that finally gives me the reason? Shouldn’t wanting something different be reason enough? To do it in my time, under my circumstances?

But my kids do not want to be homeschooled. They love their school; their friends, their parties, their people. The only way they’d consider it, they told me, is if they could still do it with their friends. And honestly, I get it.

But we don’t have anything like that around here. We have co-ops that meet once a week, online charters, but that’s not what they want, and I’m not sure it’s what I want either.

I know what the critics are saying as they read it, and I can already hear the response through my screen: You’re the mom. Do what you know is best for them.

It’s not a new argument. And it’s valid. But my kids are flourishing. They have friends, they are challenged, they love to get up and go. That should be the goal. That is the goal.

So to keep my kids safe do I start something? I have a farm. Do I find families who feel the same way and build something more intentional, something that meets more, that feels like a real community? Do I take on the responsibility of educating children?

I’m not a teacher. And I want to go back to work myself. So while the idea is alive in me, I don’t know if it’s feasible. I don’t know if it’s necessary. I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that parents I know sat in a church on Thursday and waited to find out if their kids got off the bus.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

I am terrified that if I keep my kids in school that I could be the one sitting and waiting.

Still here,

Bethany