Yearbooks
My children came home with their elementary school yearbooks this week.
Forty colorful pages held together with staples. Each page features a classroom, a grid of smiling students with their names printed under in sans serif font. A catalogue of school activities: a play, a choir concert, an art project.
What does the Robb Elementary School yearbook look like? Are teachers Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles poised and smiling in the class photo, surrounded by the fourth grade students they would die protecting? How can an entire classroom — an entire page of a yearbook — be wiped out in a matter of minutes? How do we quantify so much loss? How did we get here?
As parents, we’ve learned how to contain multitudes. We are chefs and nurses and book readers. We are clothing choosers and homework helpers and personal chauffeurs. We are counselors and supporters, entertainers and protectors. No one ever taught us how to do all these things, but love led us to learn them.
But it is impossible to learn how to hold the kind of grief and collective trauma raising kids today requires.
We are the Columbine generation, educated under the threat of gun violence only to see our children do the same at greater frequency. We got degrees we never asked for: A bachelors of holding our shit together when we see another horrific shooting scroll across the news ticker. A masters of swallowing our fear when our children get on the bus. A PhD in feeling so helpless the only thing there is to do is rage scream.
I think about my own mother. I was a sophomore in high school when 12 students and one teacher were massacred in Columbine High School. I think about how — maybe — she could have consider that a one-off. An abnormality. Something that will never happen again.
Parents today don’t have that luxury. School shootings have become a national trait as ubiquitous as American pie.
It is too easy to see our own children in the faces of the victims.
10-year-old Uziyah Garcia loved video games and anything with wheels, just like my own 10-year-old Asher.
Eliana “Ellie” Garcia loved watching “Encanto” just like my daughter Cora.
10-year-old Jose Flores Jr. has been lauded as an amazing big brother, always willing to help with his younger siblings, the way I’ve seen Laci’s son Porter do time and time again.
Lexi Rubio loved sports, a lot like Charity’s children do.
For the rest of their lives, the Robb Elementary School yearbook will be a sickening reminder of the toll of gun violence. I can’t do nothing anymore. I’ve joined Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America because we don’t have to live this way. And our children shouldn’t have to die this way. Text ACT to 644-33 to join mothers and others on the front lines of the fight against gun violence.
