Active Shooter
Jessica Bauman
Word Count 1429
There are certain texts you do not want to receive from your kid in college.
Apparently armed and dangerous person on campus
I’m sheltering in place
I’m safe
The seriousness of this did not sink in immediately. I asked Toby, my son, where he was (an office inside a building where he was about to have class) and how he was feeling (like fine – sort of nervous but also sort of desensitized). I signed off, asking him to stay in touch, telling him I love him followed by three heart emojis.
After years of gun insanity, there’s something profoundly screwed up about our relationship to the news of shootings. The weekend before Toby’s lockdown, a 21-year-old white supremacist was stopped by security on the campus of an HBCU in Florida before he could shoot anyone. So he went to a nearby Dollar store and killed three Black people at random. I had heard this story, been outraged, and disgusted by it. But also, if I’m going to be honest, I was a little bit numb to it. There are so many shootings, so many mentally ill or hate-filled people with access to military grade weaponry that it’s an emotional impossibility to let it in all the time.
It has become such a part of the background of our lives, that it took a while for me to fully process that this time, it was happening to my kid, who I had dropped off a week earlier.
When I told my husband Ben, the reality still hadn’t set in. I shared the news as if it was no big deal - something I thought he might want to know. He reacted with similar nonchalance. He was deep in work and didn’t fully surface to process what I was telling him. In the way of feedback loops, his lack of panic validated my own detachment.
Then I went to the gym, which is where I had been headed before the original text came in. By the time I had scanned my bar code at the front door, the severity of the situation had started to hit. My heart was beating faster, my breathing got shallow, my throat tight.
I texted Toby again. He texted back - multiple people shot, but he was safe, not near windows. I stopped breathing for a second. Not near windows. I looked at other people in the stretch room, peaceably doing their planks and lifting their hand weights. I reminded myself to inhale. I didn’t start to cry, but it was touch and go.
He texted that he loves me. “You too,” I responded, adding a kissy face emoji to end the exchange.
I got on the treadmill and started to run. My body burned off some of its anxious energy, but my mind was still going down the rabbit hole. No amount of knowing he was in a safe place made him safe to me.
I started thinking about the odds for our family. I’m not proud of this. But there has been enough random violence touching my family that it felt like, statistically, it could not be our turn again. My grandmother was murdered by a burglar in her home when I was fifteen. My sister’s brother-in-law was killed in one of the first mass shootings on a university campus. In CANADA, for God’s sake. About eighteen months ago, my stepbrother was killed, hit by a car while riding his bike near his home in rural Maryland. The last thing we did before heading home after moving Toby into his apartment the week before was to force him to buy a new bike helmet. He didn’t think he needed one, but I pled trauma-induced hypervigilance and he humored me. Surely, it wasn’t our turn.
This bit of magical thinking-based risk assessment calmed me down not at all. Instead, it connected me deeply with the reality that bad things can come out of nowhere and explode your world in a heartbeat.
After half an hour of anxious running, I texted again. No news. Heart emoji (me); Exclamation point heart emoji (Toby).
When I first became a parent, I was told that the main challenge is learning how to live with your heart outside your body. Leo, Toby’s older brother, was hospitalized for ten days when he was two days old – first for jaundice, then for pneumonia. Compared with true medical emergencies that surround childbirth and newborns, this was nothing. But for us, it was huge. It took years to fully metabolize those ten days.
In some fundamental way, I met myself as a parent during that time in the hospital with my days-old baby. I discovered I possessed an unapologetically protective impulse I never would have expected. I raged about (and sometimes to) the interns, who all looked like they were twelve years old – why was Doogie Howser caring for my baby? Once, I physically prevented one of them from ineptly sticking Leo’s heel a third time to get enough blood for some test I decided he didn’t need. I was fierce.
Yet I have also been proud that we weren’t parents who hovered. Our kids took the subway alone in fifth grade. In middle school, they went to the park with friends and no grown-ups. As teenagers, they got on airplanes by themselves and went far away to have amazing adventures. When they went to college, I missed them, but also celebrated their independence.
But now it started to look a little bit different to me. Maybe my ability to avoid being a hypervigilant parent has been a direct result of the luck of our circumstances - of how little actual danger my kids have had to face. I think about parents in war zones or neighborhoods with stray bullets flying. Who knows what kind of mother I would have been somewhere else?
As I discovered the pit of terror opening inside me during Toby’s lockdown, it became obvious that I am no better at living with my heart outside my body than I was when Leo was in an incubator with an IV tube bringing him antibiotics. The world is a dangerous place, and all I want to do is put my body in between the danger and MY KID.
After the gym, I tried to distract myself by going grocery shopping. I was wandering the aisles, unable to figure out what to put in the cart, when the phone rang. Toby. The lockdown was over, and he was about to get on his bike and go home.
He sounded OK. Shaken, but alright. He said that at the beginning, he imagined he would have to bike home through a hail of bullets, but as the lockdown went on, he calmed down. I didn’t say anything about how terrified I had been. Instead, I made suggestions - lots of suggestions - for what he should do now. I poured all the hovering, helicoptering, hypervigilant mothering I could think of into that phone until finally, he had to go.
Before I went to bed that night, I sent him one last text: Heart emoji, Heart emoji, Heart emoji.
Two weeks and two days later, I was walking to meet a friend for lunch when I got a text from Toby. Another active shooter on campus - he was sheltering in place again.
Last Time, he texted in a truly random way: me but not his father, his brother in a group chat they share with another pair of brothers that is mostly dedicated to bitching about the Yankees. This Time, it was all coming over our family group chat. This Time, I grasped the seriousness of what was happening right away. Moments after the ping of Toby’s first text, Leo called me to see if I was OK. I knew the answer immediately: I was not. None of us was OK.
This lockdown only lasted an hour – much shorter than Last Time. No shots were fired, and no one was hurt. Physically.
Last Time, we had no idea how to respond. Now, we have a Way We Do Things. As I scan my texts and remember how I reacted Last Time, I seem incredibly naïve, innocent to the ways of Lockdowns. Last Time, it was unfathomable. A singularity. Now, there is no way to pretend that’s true. Now I know that there very well might be a Next Time.
So here we are. At this comparatively late parenting date, there seems to be a new terror that I have to learn to live with.
There are no emojis for that.
Jessica is a director and community-engaged theater artist based in Brooklyn. She is the proud mom of two amazing young men. She has written about her theater work in American Theatre magazine and HowlRound. This is her first published personal essay.