Scary Drills

Last week, on Thursday we received an email for school. Nothing to write home about. They had successfully executed on a planned fire drill. All the kids had done a great job, knowing exactly what to do and where to move to once the fire alarm went off. Fairly benign. Besides that, my brain immediately went to the fact that anytime the fire alarm goes off at home (which is not often, except for one time when the system malfunctioned and of course set the alarms off multiple times in one night), the boys always remind us of the time that dad burned the bacon and set off the alarm. A fleeting, funny thought but it was right back to work afterwards.

By the end of the day, cabin fever had hit. I am incredibly lucky to work remotely full-time. It is a massive win all around. My husband used to do the same, but has transitioned to in-office four days a week so it really is just me and the puppy, all day, every day during the week. Our office area is in our basement, which is a lovely space but was feeling a bit dungeon-y that day It was one of the three gorgeous days New England seems to be blessed with during our fake spring. Only three weeks ago we were hit with the all-too-familiar April snowstorm. But last Thursday was beautiful. The perfect patio weather. Tempting and torturing me every time I went upstairs to get more water or a snack or lunch. There were a lot of snacks that day. Anyways, when my husband got home, I suggested we throw out our carefully constructed dinner plans for a patio dining experience. He needed no convincing, so after work we picked up the boys from school together and headed off to a nearby patio-adorned restaurant that we already know is a safe place for our oldest to eat.

The boys picked an outdoor table, we ordered and settled into our normal after school conversations. What was your special today (gym, art, music, etc)? What was the best part of your day? Again, run of the mill talking points. Shortly thereafter, the topics took a turn I didn’t see coming.

Our son mentioned that a lot of kids at school point out that he is small. We inquired as to why that was or in what context they talked about his size. He was not bothered by it and in fact seemed to be happy that he was smaller in stature than others in his class. He continued by identifying that there was a really small space at the back of their classroom closet. Again, I asked more questions, like why he would need to worry about that back of the closet. Do you get to play hide n’ seek in class? I already knew that was not the reason. But I still wasn’t prepared for the words that came next.

He told us that he would be small enough to fit into this little nook at the very back of the closet. That way, if they ever had to go into lockdown, he could squeeze himself into that little nook so he could hide from any robbers that come into the school.

That gravity of that moment weighs heavy on your soul.

Continuing, he described how a friend told him about needing to hide under their desks if a robber came into their school and how he must not have been at school that day because he doesn’t remember doing the drill himself. He then proceeded to ask if my husband or I had to do any scary drills when we were in school. The scariest I came up with was tornado drills which were fairly normal growing up in Wisconsin. My husband couldn’t come up with anything. In comparison to active shooter drills, tornado drills seem like a piece of cake. There were no scary drills growing up for us. But the scary factor is ten fold for our children.

I’ve known that active shooter drills were a reality. All parents do. Regardless of how old your kids are. It’s a reality whether your kids are at daycare or preschool or are school aged. And if you’re not there yet, you’re thinking about it because eventually you will be there. In the past, we’ve inquired in a cursory way to see if they had participated in anything other than a fire drill. We have never received a single communication from school about anything other than a fire drill and I didn’t want to outright ask and potentially lead to fear on their end.

There are no words as a parent when you look across the table, watching your son take a sip of his Mug Root Beer one second and identify that his size would help him avoid being spotted by a shooter in his school the next. It also means at some other point on a different day, my child felt the need to observe his classroom from the perspective of someone needing to save their own life. While at school. At eight years old. The world temporarily stopped spinning.

This is the same little boy who tells his puppy how much he loves her on a daily basis. Or covers me with a blanket if he thinks I’m cold. And has brought his most prized possession, a monkey that originally belonged to my husband as a baby, to his little brother in hopes of comforting him when he was upset. Now he lives with the reality that there is the potential that another human being would elect to bring a weapon to his school with the intention of hurting him and his friends.

We are beyond lucky that this was only a conversation. That neither of our boys has actually experienced a lockdown. That we as parents have never been on the other end of a call or a text or notification that an active shooter was now our reality. But the fact that the potential is there, is something I don’t think I’ll ever learn to live with.

You want to live in a bubble and on many days, it can feel like you succeeded. Our bubble is typically burst by allergies, not conversations about robbers in school. That day my bubble shattered and took so much of my mama heart with it. I don’t know how to end this. I wish these words were never ones I had to put on paper. That this was a post I never had to start. But that’s not the world we live in. It’s not the world we’re handing to our children. Before the tears and the anger take over again, I’m going to pause my words until there is something less earth-shattering to write about. Instead I am going to sneak into their rooms to make sure they are still tucked in cozy and warm under their blankets and lament in the fact that I will send them off to school tomorrow, where last week my son identified places to hide from robbers rather than simply worrying about his spelling words.