Half way through watching the documentary Newtown I had to scoop up my sleeping five-year-old boy and hold him as close to me as I could. Listen to him breathe in and out. Feel his heartbeat at my side. Trace his sleeping face with my finger tips.
I remember where I was the day Sandy Hook happened. Oliver was exactly six months old that December day. I was holding him in my arms watching that horrible helicopter footage of the school. The photos of the parents crumpled in the arms of loved ones.
I’ve never felt so affected by a mass shooting as I was by Sandy Hook because this time I was a new mother and there was a security that was forever shattered by the easily executed murder of those twenty children.
Now when I drop my son off at school, I hug him just a little tighter, and I have to think to myself that this could be the last time I see my baby alive. However, brief the thought is, it still crosses my mind every time. Always I feel this sense of relief when a happy smiling boy runs out of those school doors safely into my arms.
That’s where we are now in this country. We have to fear the worst when our children are in their school classrooms because the worst happened in a small town in Connecticut.
I’ll never get over the fact that America faced Sandy Hook and didn’t change anything. People would rather coldly call those bereaved parents actors in an elaborate hoax than look that day in the eye for what it was.
I wish I could say that we as a nation learned something from Sandy Hook, but we didn’t. We just held those weapons closer to us while twenty sets of parents now have to live everyday without their children in their arms.
It’s tragedy that is seared into my conscience as a mother in a country that loves and protects its guns so much. At any moment, I could be in the shoes of those Newtown parents. We all could be and the fact that, that thought isn’t enough for us to change anything continues to terrorize and baffle me.
Newtown is now on Netflix. I highly suggest that everyone watches it. It broke my heart in half. Go watch the film, hear their story. They deserve to have people see and hear their pain that will never go away.