Her face makes me think of my own daughter.
There’s a photo on Facebook, shared by a friend of the Scruggs family, showing the happy family posing together in matching checked shirts. Little Hallie Scruggs beams at the camera, a beautiful smile on her precious face. I sat and stared at that photo for a while, looking at the tiny face of a little girl whose life was cut short far too soon in the Nashville shooting. Of a family whose world was just completely, utterly destroyed.
I, along with every mom in America, could far too easily imagine that one day, our child could be the next Hallie. I could picture getting the phone call, the terrifying wait to know if this was it — if your child was the one. The soul-shattering realization that they were. But what is just an imagining for me is reality for the Scruggs family, and for five other families as well.
It’s the latest school shooting in a long line of them. I’m an elder millennial; I remember what it was like to not be afraid to go to school. Columbine was a shocking act of violence for my generation; no one could imagine something like that happening for us. But today’s kids, they have active shooter drills and the knowledge that school shootings aren’t crazy acts of violence that no one would ever see coming. They’re commonplace now. Expected.
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As is usually the case after a school shooting, people will fight and argue over what the answers are to stop these from happening again; I’m not going to do that. Partly, it’s because I know full well I don’t have the answer, and partly because I think it’s too complicated an issue to have an easy solution. But we want it to be easy, because it’s a comforting thought. If we just do this, then our kids will be safe.
If only that were true.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know this: looking at that picture of Hallie Scruggs, I saw my daughters. Thinking of the pain those families are experiencing tonight, after the Nashville shooting, makes me terrified to send my kids to school. Will they be next?
I spent much of the evening yesterday frustrated, stressed out, and angry with my kids. But then, they went to bed, and I saw that picture. And all I wanted to do was hug them one more time… one extra hug. Just in case.
There isn’t much I can do to make the world safe for my children. No matter what it is — school shootings, war, terrorism — there is a scary world out there that I can’t protect them from. As their mother, I want to keep them safe from every bad thing there is and make the world perfect for them. But I can’t… so instead, I’m going to hug them extra tight. I’m going to whisper to them that I love them while they’re sleeping, take an extra second to memorize every detail of their perfect faces. I’m going to soak all of it in while I still can today.
Just in case.
Just in case the next time they go to school, they’re robbed of their tomorrows.
