The Carpool Line
I wrote this essay during the fall of 2021 and sent it out to a few places, but it never found a home. It’s been lingering in my Google Drive, waiting for me to decide what to do with it. Then I remembered The Darling Files project by Rachel Nevergall and Callie Feyen: an effort to share words that haven’t yet found a home. I looked up the date and made a note to publish the essay on my blog during the December window. As I got the post ready to publish, I realized that today, December 14, is the ten-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting. I can’t publish this post, on this date, without asking you to do one small thing to make schools safer for our kids. Call your Senator and ask them to take action on gun safety. Sign a petition. Donate to or volunteer with Everytown for Gun Safety or Moms Demand Action.
The first hint of a fall breeze trickles into my gold Honda Odyssey as I reach across the passenger seat to find my carpool tag. In the rearview mirror, I see my toddler kicking his bare feet, his shoes and socks joining the army of others scattered across the floor of my minivan. The sky is a brilliant Carolina blue, sprinkled with a dusting of puffy white clouds. It’s a beautiful September day, the weather so perfect it seems it was ordered from a catalog.
I pick up the library book sitting next to me and for a moment, the carpet of Goldfish crumbs on the floor of my minivan and the fact that I don’t know what I’m going to cook for dinner are my biggest concerns. For the next fifteen minutes, things will be predictable: I will sit in the car and read. I will hand Color Wonder markers back to my toddler when he tires of his Water Wow book. The line will start moving and I will fold down the corner of my page, toss my book back into the passenger seat, and inch forward, slowly, waiting to reclaim my children.
The screen of my phone lights up, and I grab it reflexively. “Breaking News,” reads the notification, and I feel a slight sense of relief that it isn’t the school calling. Though I am just around the corner, only minutes away from my kindergartner and second grader climbing back in my car, I am out of practice with my children being away from me. This is only the second week back in the school building after an extended absence, stretching through two school years, due to the global pandemic that is still not over.
Out of habit, I read the notification before turning back to my book, and suddenly my heart turns to lead, sinking slowly into the depths of my stomach. “Student found with two guns at Raleigh high school.” I click the notification with trepidation to see the name of the school, wincing when I realize it’s the closest high school to where I am. One mile from where I am waiting in the carpool line, a student brought two guns to school. Two days ago, there was a shooting one hundred miles to the west. The week before, there was another, one hundred and forty miles to the east.
“It’s too much,” I whisper, sinking lower in my seat. “Sending them to school shouldn’t be this scary.”
A siren wails in the distance, a faint but ominous reminder of the perfect weather days that have been a harbinger of world-changing events. Twenty years later, people still talk about how blue the sky was the day the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. My most vivid memories of the week before the pandemic upended our lives are of how beautiful the spring days were, the perfect weather that was a backdrop to increasingly unsure conversations happening outside the school about the new virus dominating headlines and prompting the cancellation of event after event.
Abandoning my book, I gaze out the window, staring at a cloud as if it can give me the answer to how we’ve gotten here, to a place where school shootings are common occurrences.
Two years ago, when my son was in kindergarten, he casually mentioned over breakfast that one of his classmates didn’t listen to the teacher when she told everyone how important it was to be quiet during the code red drill.
The knife in my hand froze, hovering above the strawberries I was slicing for his lunch. Trying to make my voice steady, I asked, “What happened?”
It was such an ordinary morning; doling out frozen waffles and bowls of yogurt while packing lunches, juggling feeding my baby while making sure my preschooler’s green folder made it back into his backpack and my kindergartner had his school library books to return. But it wasn’t an ordinary conversation. Nothing about asking your kindergartner which of his classmates is most likely to attract the attention of a school shooter during a lockdown is normal.
I remember the dishes in the sink swimming before my eyes, being transported back in time; to the day that school shootings entered my consciousness, when I was in seventh grade and Columbine happened. I remember wondering, for the first time, if I was safe at school. I remember the day, newly married with a kindergarten stepson, that I abandoned any pretense of doing my job because I couldn’t look away from the horror that was happening at Sandy Hook. I remember thinking, after that, things have to change.
The principal walks by, signaling the start of carpool and bringing me back to the present. I put the minivan in drive and move a few feet closer to where my children are waiting. Things haven’t changed, I think.
No, now I worry about code red drills and pandemic precautions. I make sure I tell my boys I love them each morning when they get out of the car. I pause each day after I turn the corner from the school parking lot, watching them run inside the doors. They are not afraid. But I am.
I turn into the parking lot, scanning the students standing on the sidewalk, looking for their striped bookbags; one navy and white, one green and navy. There they are—my second grader’s face covered by his outer space mask, my kindergartner’s with a dinosaur mask. An orange Nalgene swings from my older child’s finger and my five-year-old waves wildly at the sight of me. I plaster a smile on my face and hit the button to slide open the minivan door. Oblivious to my anxiety, they climb in, bubbling over with stories about their days. I push down the impulse to ask if they know how important it is to stay quiet during a code red drill, whether anyone in their class was absent today, and if they ate lunch inside or out.
“Which playground did you get to play on today?” I ask instead, as we drive past the orange cones and out of the carpool line.