Our Hearts in this Wild World

Our childhoods are made up of everyday moments that have no reason to stay with us for 30, 40 and more years, but that nevertheless do. Just yesterday, I was recounting Mr. Barber, who was an up-the-next street neighbor from Arlington, before our family moved to Ohio. His hedges of raspberry bushes at the side of his house remain my adulthood dream. This summer, I will plant those memories in a shady corner and think of Mr. Barber when I do.

My school bus driver, after we moved to Ohio, was Bernie Johnson. Every childhood deserves a Bernie Johnson. I had in many ways a Norman Rockwell childhood, growing up on a farm in a small community with a graduating class of around 100. And Bernie was a vivid supporting character of that life, part of my day 5 days a week, knowing how smoothly our morning had gone by the way we flew out of the house to meet him.

Sometimes, as part of the general safety routine, our bus would pull into a parking lot or other off-the-road spot, and we’d fire drill, all lined up down the aisle, ready to jump out the back door. It was fun, really.

Someone once said that having a child is to have your heart go walking out into the world. I’m sure this has always been a terrifying proposition. In the days of Viking raids, or smallpox, or when farming meant crossing prairies in a covered wagon to face winters with sparse provisions and unknowns at every turn, parents certainly had to tenaciously have more hope and faith than fear, just to face each morning anew.

Parenting is knowing that life is not navigable without heartbreak. Their hearts, and by extension yours, will bruise and contract with each playground slight, with each goal, hard-fought, but lost. Birthday invitations that don’t materialize as expected. Test scores that don’t belie the timr and struggle put into them.

Parenthood is knowing that your children may laugh and thrill to a bi-annual school bus fire drill, but that the reason we have fire drills and wear seat belts and yell, panicked from across the street, “Look both ways!”, is that we are indeed sending our hearts walking out into the world, and it’s a wondrous, beautiful, terrible, heartbreaking place. We know it, and we all just want to bind up our children, and friends, and family, and those of everyone we know, in a force field of our fierce love, protecting them all from the stings and arrows and worse that life can hand out.

Recently, both of my children have had to navigate changing friendships. My youngest called me at work, in tears, confused and hurt by a friend who has chosen a new group of friends who are perhaps destined to be the Mean Girls of their grade, who, at age 10, delight in exclusion and petty insults. An actual seizing of my heart and chest occurred, right at my desk at work, even while I said as calmly as possible that friendships change, and that walking away from people who aren’t a good fit for us any more is an inevitable part of life, from childhood through old age.

“But it hurts,” my daughter said. And what can any parent do but agree. It does. Too often.

But on the flip side, my daughter’s other-mother, the mother of her best friend, swooped in with the world’s best spur of the moment play date. A heartbreaking, but ultimately a supportive love force field day. The other-mothers and the Mr. Barbers and the Bernie Johnsons of our children’s lives are a portion of our hope and faith, tackling back our fears for what lies beyond our front doors.

I think perhaps the most important thing that we can teach our children is that we are who we choose to be. We can be the yin or the yang, the darkness or the light. We have to teach them that we’re going to occasionally choose incorrectly, screw things up, and that we then have to do what we can to fix what we can. We choose.

In the aftermath of yet another shooting, I see countless posts arguing for gun control, and then also against. For the most part, they are the same Posts we saw after each previous tragedy. The Onion, a satirical online newspaper, has an article about the futility of change that they repost each time, with only names and dates changed. It speaks to the entrenched, disparate views of the nation.

Each time we renew the debate, there are posts and articles pointing out that people break laws all the time. People still speed. Still steal. Still rape and murder. That more laws won’t keep us safe. That children today are products of distracted, fast-food flinging workaholic parents who have taken God out of the lives of this broken generation. That mental health is the real culprit, that guns don’t kill people. People kill people, and have since Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel with a rock. Would we outlaw all rocks?

I will say that my stance on guns is evolving slightly. I’ve still never shot one. But when I’m hiking in bear and mountain lion territory, I don’t object to my hiking partner having one, someone who is skilled and respectful of both the wildlife and the gun. And while I don’t ever see myself owning a gun, I have, in fact, checked under beds and in closets for an unlikely intruder when I’m home alone at night. I know the fear, and I won’t judge anyone who sleeps better for having a gun responsibly kept in their home.

And I know that when I see my child palm a second cookie furtively behind her back, I don’t think my rules have failed. I don’t think it’s proof our household should now have open season on cookies. I think it’s an opportunity for conversation and correction.

I think that social change, like parenting, is about who we want to be. I think that we can choose our hope and faith over our fear. I think that we can look for one thing, just one thing, that we can agree about when we get into the spiraling black hole of online debate. I think we can agree that the terribly common mass shooting headline is not who we want to be as a nation, even as we agree that it’s a complex issue.

If you believe that mental health is the real culprit of mass shootings, call your congressperson today and demand that the one third cut to the Institute of Mental Health be rolled back. If you believe that the family unit is broken and producing broken children, become a mentor. If you believe that existing gun laws should be enforced, or assault rifles restricted, advocate for that. We don’t have to come to full agreement to do something. But we should all agree to do something. Let our goals be lofty where we are tempted to give up and send just thoughts and prayers.

When we send our hearts out into the world, we know that childhood will leave none of them unscathed. But let their scars be the inevitable pitfalls of adolescence in so much as they possibly can. Let’s teach our children that resilience and action and kindness are linked. That those three things have always been stronger than our fears. And then, by our actions and our time and our money and our strength, let them see who we choose to be, for them, our hearts.