Smoke in the Hills
Please be aware that in this piece I discuss gun violence.
It was only a matter of weeks before my first child began sleeping through the night. I promise I’m not mentioning this as a brag, it’s just a fact that defined my inaugural months of motherhood.
Just as my child was unusual in this early sleep pattern, I worried there was something unusual in my reaction to this sleep pattern. By which I mean I was worried how little I worried.
I’d gotten the distinct impression from the internet that I was supposed to hover near her constantly, monitoring her sleeping state for signs of inevitable doom. But hover I did not. I had things to do and I did them til she awoke. For some reason I just didn’t worry that she wouldn’t wake up.
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Around the same time as my daughter began sleeping through the night, there came a morning. It was the morning of December 14th. This was 2012, I remember of course because that is the year upon which I calculate my daughter’s age. I don’t suppose if you remember right away what happened on December 14th of 2012, but perhaps you will in a moment.
I was sitting in our small kitchen—a kitchen with a footprint so tiny you’d think we were in a London flat—on a stool from which I could stretch out an arm and touch any of the four walls. But my arms were busy holding my baby girl. We were nursing, and my phone buzzed with a news alert.
An image of nursing may have just arisen in your head. I know the one that arises in mine—a mother and child with an unbreakable gaze, the purest harmony of humanity, inflected with the distinct visual sensibility of the Madonna and Child of the high renaissance. But in reality I had weeks before memorized every detail of her ears and the sides of her nostrils, and eyelids, and I was unopposed—grateful even—at the distraction of a news alert.
What came was an image of an elementary school close to my own childhood hometown in south western Connecticut. A young man had taken his mother’s gun and killed twenty first graders and six educators. The young man had also killed his mother, and shot himself on the school grounds.
Writing this today, I didn’t need to look up the statistics of the numbers dead. I did just in case, but I didn’t need to. Because when you’ve just given birth and you are holding in your arms your baby—whose skin sparkled golden in the mid-winter sun and whose ear folds followed the most miraculous template of evolution—and you are nursing this promise of life, and you hear of the death of twenty children, and six educators, and a mother, and a young man whose life had not turned out the way anyone had hoped, well you remember it forever.
I remember saying to my husband through tears: “I want to raise this child to be the educator that sacrifices herself to save the rest of the school.” To which he replied: “Why should we accept a world in which she would ever need to do that?”
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Today that child is nine. She has surprised me by turning into a night owl, up late reading books as thick as your fist in secret under her bed. I never did worry much that she wouldn’t wake up when she was an infant, and I find myself now fighting most school day mornings to get her to wake up.
But my days since that December of 2012 have been inflected forevermore with worry.
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Let me see if I can have words to better explain that. It’s not an anxiety or depression as heavy as volcanic ash. Nor is it as mild as a morning mist that evaporates silently as each day rolls in. Rather it seems to me to be like the haze of a wildfire burning in the distance. I can still breathe the air, despite some acceptable level of particles. But I am in a perpetual state of alert, of suspended possibility that the winds will shift, the chaos will descend from the distance and engulf us, leaving me without her, or her without me.
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Recently our family moved out of the U.S. We were seeking an infusion of living after abiding willingly to strict lockdowns. Now we live in Cholula, Mexico, a safe and prosperous college town whose name adorns many bottles of hot sauce in the U.S. but you should know I’ve not once seen a bottle of Cholula here. “Oh that could be fun,” was the refrain of our friends and family when we announced our move. “But be careful, Mexico is super violent.”
Of course I cannot disagree that violence abounds in parts of Mexico, largely parts that are supplying the drugs so greatly demanded in the U.S. In fact 70% of all criminally owned guns in Mexico came from the U.S., and Mexico is pursuing legal action against the permissive gun laws of its neighbor to the north. But even counting the illicit guns of the cartels here, gun ownership rates are astoundingly low in comparison to the U.S. While the U.S. has 120 guns per 100 people, Mexico has about 13 guns per 100 people. These numbers are from 2017 and can be found at gunpolicy.org.
Again we live far outside the corridors of cartel control, and benefit from the privileges afforded by a middle class life. Too many people living in Mexico have no such privileges, and government protections here are often even more compromised than in the U.S.
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Back in the U.S. I used to write to my senators—I’m from Maine so it was Angus King and Susan Collins—asking for urgent action on gun control. I wrote them in December 2012 after Sandy Hook, pecking the keyboard of my laptop with a single hand while the other held my nursing baby. A month after my second daughter was born in 2014 a young man claiming to be starting an “Incel Rebellion” shot three young women and stabbed three young men, before shooting himself, and I wrote my senators again. A few months after my son was born, a young man shot 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school. I sent a letter after as many shootings as I could. I implored Senator King in particular, who is an independent and someone I think of as a neighbor since he lives just a few miles from my house, to take on gun reform policy with the commitment William Wilberforce fought slavery two hundred years ago. And yet no substantive reply came. And no action. Supermarkets, movie theaters, workplaces, city blocks, and countless schools. The wildfires kept burning, and their chaotic descent into communities across our country continued. When began to feel like a better word than if.
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Living now outside the U.S. I feel in myself a shift, a shift out of that perpetual state of possible grief. I still worry of course, though I still don’t watch my children’s sleeping bodies. But these days I worry about car accidents, about reckless play, and the onset of disease. Yet somehow these worries feel more in my control every time I check seat belts, or shout “cuidado” at a kid using a high retaining wall as a balance beam, or give them a vaccine.
The state of the world, and of parenting in this world, is chaotic enough without the wide dissemination of tools that facilitate mass murder, whether on purpose or by accident.
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I am disappointed my letters to Senator King and Senator Collins didn’t work. I have long cherished the power of words in general, and think just highly enough of my own writing that I thought maybe I could persuade them with the desperation of a mother who can’t stand the thought of writing an obituary for her child as too many others have had to do.
It seems not.
But I still maintain there is power in writing it all out.
As I wrote this piece I took myself back to that kitchen, to the golden sparkles of my baby’s skin, and the heartache of empathy with scores of other parents. Then as I wrote I guided myself to other moments holding my other babies, and felt inside me the same indigence that welled up each time a news alert crashed down. And then as I wrote I felt satisfaction with my choice to move away from the burning hills. And as I write now, I feel gratitude that someone is listening. And I feel hope that these words I’m using—imperfect and bulky as they are—of the perpetual state of possible grief resonate with you and will allow you to put words to whatever perpetual state you are living with. Those states rarely shift without being named, without being connected to memories, and without being held by someone else. And so I write this now in hopes that somehow it will shift something in all of us, so that no one will have to write the obituary of a child shot at school, at the movies or market, or stumbling upon an unsecured weapon at a friend's house.
I don’t know how to end this piece. So sit with me for a moment in this dissatisfaction and ask yourself how long you can stand the smoke.
