Locks, Lights, Out of Sight
I am a teacher, which means I should have been ready for this moment. I have practiced slamming the door shut, double checking the lock, and wedging a rubber stop beneath the door as my students curl into balls in the corner of the room. I have turned off the lights and checked the lock again before crouching on the floor alongside students who know that silence equals safety.
When they’re younger, we turn the drills into a game, handing out stickers at the end and tacking an additional five minutes to their recess as a reward for a job well done. As students get older, the stickers are replaced with statistics. Statistics reassuring them that they are more likely to be struck by lightning than they are to be murdered at school. For the oldest students, there is training.
In one of the high schools where I worked, the principal thought it would be empowering for all the students and teachers to participate in a course taught by first responders rather than simply moving through the routine active shooter drill. Sitting side by side, we learned to use tourniquets and apply pressure to arteries to staunch catastrophic blood loss. A student became physically ill midway through at the sight of the graphic images the nurses were projecting on the screen at the front of the room. The principal rubbed the student’s back as he threw up in a trash can. After the student had finished vomiting, the trash can was taken from the room and the training continued. At the end of the course, each teacher was given a tourniquet. We were instructed to keep them in the top drawer of our desk.
I did not have a tourniquet with me last summer. I wasn’t even at my desk. I was at the county fair with my daughter. She was nine years old. She and I and a child from her third-grade class were in a cinder block commercial building standing side by side in front of a display of free books the local library had put together when we heard it. “Active shooter! Get down! Get down!”
I pulled the girls through the crush of people and over to a table draped in a purple tablecloth at the front of the building. Another mother and her teenage daughter were already huddled there. The daughter was crying. The mom was whisper-screaming into her phone trying to find her son.
“Is this an earthquake drill?” my daughter’s friend asked as I directed the girls to get under the table. I said yes, because there wasn’t time to explain. I needed her to get small. To be quiet. But my daughter knew what was happening. “No. It’s not.” Her voice was even, her eyes hard. She had been rehearsing for this moment in the same way I had. Locks, lights, out of sight.
We were beneath the table for a minute, an hour, a year. People were crying. No one spoke. The music from the midway stopped. I wondered who turned it off, if everyone was able to get off the rides. My daughter’s back was to me, her forehead pressed against her knees. I wanted to pull her to me. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and hold her tight, but we were in the worst place. We were less than ten yards from the front door. I could see it from where we were. We needed to get out.
There was a man with silver hair in a snap button shirt standing by the door. He was looking through the window. His hand was on the knob. Was he holding it shut? Ready to run? I didn’t know. I left the girls beneath the table and joined him in looking through the glass towards the parking lot. It wasn’t far. It was quiet outside. No police officers. No guns. I beckoned to the girls.
“We have to go,” I said to the man.
“This is the safest place.” But as he said it he stepped aside.
I pushed through the door. The girls followed me out. “Stay behind me,” I said. And they did, falling in single file as we raced through the fairgrounds and across the parking lot. When we got to the car the girls jumped into the back seat. I locked the doors. “Nice work,” I said. “You both did exactly what you needed to do.”
My daughter nodded. “We trained for this. We were ready.”
When I sat down to draft this essay, I thought the target audience would be teachers. It would be an academic piece stressing the importance of being trauma informed as we implement the bevy of drills we run in our classrooms each year. As I began to write however, I realized that I couldn’t turn this near miss into a teachable moment for educators because on that day, huddled beneath a table with my daughter, I was one and only one thing. I was a mom.
I am a single parent. My daughter and I are close. Very close. We read each other well and typically respond to situations in incredibly similar ways. Prior to our experience at the fair, I had assumed that the two of us were on the same page in terms of our understanding of gun violence. In the aftermath of this experience, however, I have realized how wrong I was.
As I drove us home from the fair that day, I talked about how unnerved I was by the experience. I shared my gratitude for the first responders who had flooded the scene and told my daughter how proud I was of her for remaining so calm. My daughter looked into the rearview mirror, making sure I could see her face, and began to talk. She pointed to certain places on her body and said that even if she were shot in these areas, she would have been fine. These were places she could stop the bleeding with her hands. She recounted the active shooter drills she has done in school, describing in accurate detail why some of her classrooms were safer than others. After talking for about twenty minutes, my daughter leaned back in her seat. Her body relaxed and relief permeated the air. “I guess that’s it,” she said. “Now it’s done.”
In that moment I realized my daughter had never doubted that, at some point, she would need to put the skills she had learned during active shooter drills at school into practice. The only question had been when.
Perhaps it is this realization that left me shaken so long after the shooting. How could I, as a mother, as a teacher, have misinterpreted the impact that the combination of drills and media coverage documenting mass shootings has had on my daughter? While my focus has been on shielding her from distressing images and armoring her with statistics and skills designed to make her feel safe, she has been planning for the inevitable. She has looked at the pictures of the victims of school shootings and seen herself and her classmates. In her mind, the adults in her life would never ask her to spend so much time preparing for an event that would never happen.
As a mother committed to protecting her daughter, I will continue to vote, write letters, and march. It is time for government officials to take concrete, measurable steps to end gun violence and I will do my part to press them to do so. But at home, in the place where it counts the most, I need to start doing things differently. I need to acknowledge that my daughter and I will continue to have shared experiences, both good and bad, that will be processed in unique and sometimes very different ways. I will listen to and honor her experiences in this increasingly unstable world. The experience at the fairgrounds that day is part of our collective history now. Our stories are but two of many, threaded together with so many others to create a narrative that is defining our nation.
Cover photo by Carlos Martinez on Unsplash
About the Author
Catherine Alene has a MA in teaching and earned her MFA in writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a middle school reading teacher in Central Oregon where she lives with her daughter and their menagerie of animals. Catherine is the author of numerous articles and the author of the contemporary young adult novel, The Sky Between You and Me. The Sky Between You and Me was a Junior Library Guild Selection and was named one of the Best Children’s Books to Read and Share by the Washington Post.
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