Our inside voices need to get louder on gun control

Another school massacre.

Another letter from a superintendent trying to reassure us that they are doing everything humanly possible to keep our kids safe. 

Scroll through the news: Experts offer suggestions on how to talk to our kids.

Increasingly we feel unable to remain calm as the torturous details of this latest slaughter trickle out. We need our kids to function and remain in good spirits for their next active shooter drill. We need them to stay calm so that we may all carry on.

Cheerleading, perhaps, as we continue to accept such an unacceptable situation.

We heed yet another call from politicians to deliver our thoughts and prayers as they raise their hands and shoulders skyward against an idea that the right to bear arms is unassailable. 

Everything else is fair game, I guess.

We will question all motives. 

Even my husband, a supporter of weapons bans wondered aloud: "Do you think Beto was pandering?"

I tell him that I reject his question's premise ... unless we redefine pandering as begging for much-needed change.

"Beto said what we ourselves think. We should all be so impolite.

My husband apologized for asking. He just wants to be on the same page.

The one not sullied by motive and opportunity.

We will distract ourselves with calls for more security. Maybe we'll consider building metal detectors into every doorway. Maybe we'll require our teachers to be armed. More and more will die, but we will accept the press conference jargon ... that it could have been worse.

It has only gotten worse.  

The only change we'll see is the Gun Deaths line on a graph shoots ever upwards. It's been two years since that line shot past automobile accidents as the Number One killer of children under 18.

Still, the seventy percent of us who want effective Gun Control are unable to thwart the thirty percent who are managing to enact Gyn Control instead. 

None of this is ok. But what can we do? 

Why can't we enforce the "well-regulated militia" part of the second amendment?

Why can't we ban military-style weapons?

Why can't we require insurance and licensing for every single gun? 

We have been effective in creating a system that protects neither life nor liberty. Or ... as thethirty percentt are so fond of telling us ... we live in a Republic not a Democracy. 

It's easy to feel hopeless. 

The gun industry is banking on that despair for its livelihood. a never-ending circle of violence. 

There is so much more we can do to exert political pressure over this status quo. We should remind ourselves that Beto, using his inside voice to speak truth to power, and being shouted down with expletives, should strike a nerve within us all. 

Mamie Till showed the world what hatred did to her child. It is well past time we make our leaders take a long, hard look at what their greed keeps doing to ours.

Sisyphus, Running

Running is often a solitary sport.

Alone, we keep our bodies in rhythm as we try to outpace our thoughts. We may charge up a hill with an upbeat tempo feeding into our headphones and roll back down, listening to the sound of the songbirds gliding along on the breeze.


It can get lonely.


Running, as a practice, is supposed to be a kind of “de-stressor.”


So, of course, one of the first rules in running clubs is: Don't talk politics. It will only make the activity distressing.


Stepping on toes, both literally and figuratively, can lead to dangerous places: quite literally a blood-pumping, heart-pounding way to a leaner, meaner you.


It can also lead to long, sole-crunching silences.


Which is exactly where I found myself after accidentally wandering into the topic of Roe-reversal at mile-two of a six-mile run: feeling like the someone had pressed the mute button on the world.


My Republican friend couldn't understand why his Liberal friends, like myself, had to keep saying the word "abortion." Especially since many people like him – well-meaning citizens without the benefit of a medical degree -- hadn't understood how many other reproductive procedures the bans might restrict.


He was just starting to understand the consequences: That the same drugs and procedures prescribed for early abortion are also prescribed for the treatment of early miscarriages; and that pharmacies may not fill those prescriptions in fear of legal reprisals. He didn't know how many procedures used to treat medical complications, including fetal demise, have been hog tied by the abortion debate as it has been written into the letter of the law. But he still feels the weight of a moral quandry: That it seems as if there are too many women who aren't being responsible with their choices. And who wouldn't want to save babies?


He knew a few women who had bad experiences or had used abortion as birth control. It didn't seem right.


So these are the stakes?


“I see the handful of people you know personally who use abortion as "birth control," and raise you the handful I've known whose abortions allowed them to continue educations, leave unhealthy relationships or saved their lives.

"This isn't politics, it's personal."


I say the words. Loudly, and with feeling.


"We can not make it our business, as a nation, to make abortion inaccessable for those who need one. Abortion must be safe, and it must be legal throughout the duration of a pregnancy because things can always go wrong. We need to ensure that women have the best healthcare for them. We have to be able to direct the course of our lives. Women should have the right to determine whether they are ready to be pregnant from the very start and that we can have the most compassionate care at the end if something goes heartbreakingly wrong. Abortion is healthcare for women."


The sounds of our running shoes scratching through gravel suddenly got louder. All other sounds retreat.


The silence startles me for a moment.


I begin to apologize, but he won't accept. He says there is no need. We are friends.


“We all just need to keep talking, keep listening, and keep trying to find common ground.”

I can't take back my position, but I want to roll back my rage.

This may be the hill I'm willing to die on, but  I rather the death be from exhaustion than getting flattened over and over by the heavy burden I tried to push up here by myself.

On The Town (Fate, Accomplice)

… : )

Hey, mom? What are you doing later?

I could almost hear the honey in her voice as I read the text.

This, dear friends, is not an open-ended question meant to ascertain a person's availability for a fun and frivolous after-work past-time.

Intuition (and experience) told me this was a trick. And it begged for an open-ended response.

"Why, what's up?"

Three dots pulsated again and then disappeared.

When the words finally appeared they offered nary a hint of specificity. 

"I was hoping you'd do something for me."

I imagined her voice as sharp Boston vowels tumbling from Ben Affleck's mouth: "I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people."

I thought for a moment about forwarding my to-do list complete with appointments and meetings, making a particular notation of a closeted desire ... that one of my teenage progeny might gather up the dunes of laundry spreading through the house on the shifting winds of the season and put their grains where they belong.

I don't want to be the one doing the “sniff test.”

That, I know will happen someday, when they get houses and washers and children of their own. Today is not that day. Today she wants me to take her shopping. She has her own car ... her own money ... her own ideas about what she wants. Why is she asking me to be a part of it?

Is this a trick?

What can I offer? The past should inform her that her mother can only lay a wet blanket over the fire within. I can bring the admonition for spending too extravagantly. I have reached the age (unhappily) that the let-me-speak-to-your-manager vibe isn't as mortifying as it should be. Surely, she's not anywhere near ready to allow me to be the conduit between her youthful sensibilities and the desire to get a sale price.

She can't want me to talk her out of whatever skimpy thing shaped like clothes that her heart desires ... Or to make her think about the cost basis ratios … can she?

Dresser drawers? Washer? Trash? Maybe it's Trash, washer, dresser drawers ... The order of operations has always been quite flexible. 

I've been here before. Only I wasn't the mother then. 

Youth fashion hasn't changed all that much since I used to try and fit in. 

Time is so weird how it moves in fits and starts. How it weaves in and out. 

Time with her as I have experienced it ... the daily hum of music, song, arguments, hugs, laughter, tears, papers rustling, clothes thrown here and there, finger-pointing, eye-rolling, slammed doors, the occasional plate of warm cookies, and an explosive mess in the kitchen ... will freeze.

But it won't stand still. 

She will be three hours away, living her best life. And I will be waiting for those three pulsating dots to complete our connection.

For once, I won't say what I'm thinking. 

Instead, I respond with my best Jeremy Renner imitation: "Whose car are we gonna take?"

Wish us well

 Don't wish me a happy Mother's Day.

 

I am a person.

 

A person with a uterus.

 

A person who has grown fetuses. Birthed babies

 

I am a person who has chosen a path.

 

A path that was sometimes made rockier because people can identify me as a woman.

 

Considered less. Valued less. Always expected to do more ... with less. 

 

Separate. Not equal. That's life. 

But as we face a new dystopian future, I am a very unhappy mother.

 

True, I have moved past the phase in my life where my body can grow an organ to sustain a fetus. But my body has done this twice. Both times it was daunting and not without unpleasant and frightening complications. 

 

I didn't fully understand the seemingly limitless risks involved in pregnancy and childbirth as I was about to undertake them. A lot of the choices came down to probabilities calculated by others with more knowledge about all the complications that could occur. The cynical part of me would tell you they didn't want me to worry my pretty little head about.

 

The truth is there are so many things that can go wrong, it would be near impossible to explain all of them in the course of a single office visit.

 

That's what I told myself In the aftermath of my pregnancies: Everyone did their best. Because how could an ordinary person willingly put themselves at such risk when the outcome could be as life ending as life affirming? 

 

People who want babies will.

 

But why should people who don't want children be forced to take any of those risks?  A decision made by five people in a marble courthouse who firmly and cynically  believe laws that made abortion understood as a constitutional right were, instead, “wrongly decided” and not “settled law” after all? Five originalist thinkers working us back into a place where our inhabitants are either enslavers or the enslaved.

Unacceptable.

 

Your husband can’t make you give him a kidney, but he can make you give him a kid? 

 

And the state will enforce this labor. And not only will it enforce it, it will ensure that the labor is as hard and hurtful as humanly possible.

 

Do we accept this as we have accepted restricted access to abortion and birth control? Like we have allowed over-burdensome regulations: Forced cooling periods; multiple and unnecessary medical procedures. Extreme scrutiny including the gauntlet of harassment that has accompanied us to even the most routine medical exams and procedures?  

 

Do we accept another hurdle to proper care like we accepted the impossibility of getting birth control from the dominant Catholic healthcare system?

 

As I contemplate these questions, I wonder what my life would have been like had this country fully embraced my humanity. I can’t imagine what my daughter’s experience will be when our country denies hers entirely. 

 

The dystopian future that Margret Atwood showed us just a few decades ago in literature seems closer than ever to becoming real life. Parts of it have always been here. 

 

It’s not ironic that the handful of extremists on the Supreme Court shaping this future have relied on the great injustices of our past to get us there. 

 

There is no going back. Not because we have come "too far," but because we haven't gone nearly far enough. 

Don't wish your mother a happy day today. Wish her a healthy one.

I am Switzerland

The war broke out in our car on the way to the restaurant. The girl, now aged to the earliest point of adult maturity, had fired the opening shot. It had seemed to come out of nowhere:

"New York bagels are the only bagels anyone should eat. You shouldn't bother with bagels from anywhere else."


Granted, I hadn't been listening to the conversation happening on either side of me. I had been sitting there on the hump, thinking about dinner and, with every bump in the road, reconsidering my decision to let everyone prone to car sickness, (or whose growth-spurting bodies no longer comfortably fit in the car's "way back" seats) travel in relative comfort.


The boy's head bolted upright as if roused from sleep by the blast of a horn.


"How can any bagel be bad? By definition, they are dense orbs of starch goodness. Toasted and buttered, they can not fail."


Then it got heated .. or more precisely ... it got a little hot over the dish served cold. And the barbs started to fly past me in both directions.


"What do you mean 'toasted," I'm not talking about secondary processing. The flavors of cream cheese or the salt-ratios of butter. I'm talking about plain bagels taken from a bin and put straight into a paper bag. I'm talking about the attributes of the raw, unadulterated bagel."


For a moment there was mouth-gaping silence.


She had stuck out her proverbial beach. Left it wide open. And he saw the opportunity.


His eyes sparkled as he went for the kill.


"Oh. Well, that explains it then. You are a crazy person who eats raw bagels and decides they don't pass muster. Your bagel expertise is based on a taste for uncooked dough, which, let's face it, is entirely gross no matter what state the Bagel Bakery works out of."


I so wanted to take her side.


She wasn't wrong. There are certainly awful bagels to be had. Thin and anemic, they are often frozen monstrosities that our moms bought in bulk and would get covered in delicate ice crystals before we'd get hungry enough to thaw one out and try to choke it down with a slathering of peanut butter.


But neither was he. In the hours before The Big Shop market day, as the delectable snacks dwindle, you will eat that slab of starch the package calls a "bagel" and you will like it. That's how "junk food" works its terrible magic.


It's also how freshman boys who would rather get root canals than do another page of Earth Science homework, win debates against senior girls who have just been accepted to about a dozen discerning colleges.


Which is where just one ounce of maturity. One moment of calm left out to warm, could turn this whole thing around.


And I saw HER eyes gleam.


“Oh, I see what this is: It's a schmear campaign.”


Just like that the argument ended in laughter.

I didn't even have to use my secret weapon: knowledge that the most popular bagel in New York City right now gets trucked in from Redding, Connecticut.

Somehow I managed to stay in the frying pan and out of that fire. I'm willing to bet it's all because I prefer Swiss on my bagel.