Safety.

2.18.18

There’s one particular image that is still haunting me, four days later. It’s from one of the cell phone videos that one of the students captured from the corner of the classroom. In it, the SWAT team enters the room, guns drawn, demanding that the students put their hands up. And hands go up. But one pair of hands stands out from the others. These two particular hands are shaking uncontrollably. They’re trembling. Actually, it’s worse than that. They’re flapping. They’re the hands of a child whose life just changed.

That’s the image that I cannot get out of my mind.

I was on another airplane when the events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took place. It was an easy flight, with the majority of my time spent finalizing and tweaking my presentation scheduled for the following day with educators in Minnesota, focused on how to support beginning educators. It wasn’t until I got into my rental car and turned on NPR that I learned that it was happening. Again. Another school shooting. At a high school. With an unconfirmed number of fatalities, the only thing certain was that there were many.

I know how this goes for me. I lock into NPR in the car and then CNN in my hotel room and I begin to embody the terror and sadness through every cell in my body and I can’t turn it off. I turn inward. I don’t talk to anyone, I don’t call my husband, I don’t journal, I don’t read, I don’t change the channel, I just watch. And there’s so much to watch. I am paralyzed with watching.

I watch the images from the helicopters as students run out of the school, backpacks abandoned. I watch as parents envelope their children, many with ashes on their forehead, many wearing red and pink hearts as this was both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. I watch the cell phone footage from the students. Footage more graphic and horrific than anything I’ve ever seen before. So graphic that my brain can hardly allow me to register that these images are real. There is blood. There are bodies. There is blood and there are bodies next to desks and books and all the familiar images that my brain has categorized into ‘school’ and ‘learning.’ These images don’t belong together. There are images of police cars and ambulances and riot gear and transcripts from text messages and the voice a superintendent speaking for a community when no job training or degree prepared him for this moment.

When I finally force myself to close my eyes, the last thing I remember hearing was that even then, eight hours later, parents were still waiting to hear the news.

Eight.

Hours.

Later.

Still.

Waiting.

And no one could give a good explanation as to why, no matter how many ways or times Anderson Cooper pushed on this.

******

Those first few moments in the morning when I’m traveling are always kind of this no-man’s land where it takes me a bit to figure out where I am, what day it is, what my schedule is, and if I’m awake early or already running late. On February 15^th I realized that I was in Minneapolis, I was on time, I was headed to a training with mentors, coaches, teachers, and administrators from all over the state, and there were 17 confirmed dead in Parkland, Florida.

I set forth in my routine, I delivered my training with all of my heart and my full presence and I came home and crawled into bed, not ready to face this familiar scene of the day after. I surrendered until my husband came home with flowers and pistachios and Clementines (all of my favorite treats) and gently reminded me that we still had our own Valentine’s Day to celebrate and I got up because I love him and I love that he re-centers me when I shut down.

And for a few hours I forgot about the images. I enjoyed a phone-free dinner with my husband in a quiet restaurant followed by an after-dinner drink in our neighborhood pub where we watched the figure skaters in the Olympics.

******

And now the debates are flowing hot and heavy all over social media. I refuse to enter into the wild west landscape of the comments. I want my world to return to photos of Instant Pot creations and daughters all dressed up to attend fancy dances with their fathers, the men of my high-school years. But that is not the world anymore. Not right now.

Columbine happened when I was in my first year in my own classroom, a handful of miles away from Littleton. I was a long-term sub in an eighth-grade civics class (as a trained English teacher), 23 years old, and I was totally in over my head in so many ways. I called my parents for advice as to what to say to my students on April 21^st as I had no idea where to even start, feeling too young and totally unprepared to face these scared souls the following day, with my own terror of how our world had changed on April 20^th, 1999.  I don’t remember what I said exactly. I am fairly positive (or at least hopeful) that my words revolved around safety and how they were indeed safe at school and how it was my job to keep them safe and I promised them that I would. And I believed that.

And then Sandy Hook happened and I was brought to my knees. More precisely, I was brought to my back. I couldn’t get out of bed for days after Sandy Hook. If my husband hadn’t turned off the TV and lifted me back into the world I’d probably still be in the fetal position in our bed.

These days, my research and my work centers around self-care for educators. It’s my passion project. My crusade. I am convinced with my entire heart that if teachers can take exquisite care of themselves, they’ll be equipped to take exquisite care of their students.

But how does self-care protect a teacher—or a child—from an assault rifle?

This question haunts me.

For my self-care work, I use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as the research-based foundation for the work. We learn to check in with ourselves and ask ourselves questions related to each level of the hierarchy. We start at level one and ask ourselves if our basic needs are met. In other words, have we eaten? Have we had enough water? Did we sleep last night? And if we answer yes to that level, we express gratitude and move to level two. Here, we ask ourselves, ‘Do I feel safe?’

And here’s where I’m stuck. Where so many of us are stuck. Do we feel safe? No. We do not feel safe.

I strive to be a positive person. I work hard to see the good in the world and in individual people, even those who act the worst. I remind myself—daily—that there is more love in the world than evil. And most days I believe that and I feel safe enough to move to level three of the hierarchy. But I’ve been stuck at level two for four full days now.

Life, of course, continues to go on and I play my role and I attempt to secure my own oxygen mask. I go for long walks with my dog and do yoga in my office. I savor date night with my husband. I give myself permission to spend Saturday afternoon absorbed in a novel. I go to bed before 9:00 on a Saturday night. I avoid numbing out with wine and instead pour myself another glass of sparkling water.

And yet I feel off. Twitchy. Anxious. Nervous. Emotionally wrought.

I’m on another airplane as I write this. This time I’m heading to Kansas to work with a school district on how to create highly engaged classrooms for our students. But there will be an elephant in the room with us. An elephant holding a sign with strobe lights screaming at us that NONE OF THIS MATTERS if we don’t first feel safe.

On a grand scale, I’m committed to The Cause. I’m ready to march, to call, to write, to scream, to walk-out, to rally, and engage in all the other verbs that might result in action.

But I’m also concerned about tomorrow. And Tuesday. And Wednesday. And how we help our educators feel safe themselves so that they can, in turn, help their students—your children--feel safe as well.

So here’s where I believe we start:

We review our school safety plans, one more time, and visualize our own mode of action even though we hate thinking about it. We look at our class lists, one more time, and check-in with each individual student, ensuring that each of those souls feels connected to at least one other student and one other adult in the building. We look students in the eye and we pull them aside for one-on-one conversations where we listen like heaven, the standards be damned for a minute.

We make sure that our own family has a safety plan. Are essential phone numbers memorized? Do we have a way to charge our cell phones? Have we told each other how much we love that person and why? Have we forgiven acts that need to be forgiven?

And then we take time to focus on the good. We are grateful that schools now have precise protocols even though we hate that we have to. We are grateful that those protocols continue to be refined, even though we are enraged that this is a need. We are grateful that there are first responders who run towards us and grief counselors who hold space for us. We listen to our colleagues with our whole hearts and check in on the quiet ones or the ones whose hands tremble. Particularly the newbies.

We take radical care of ourselves. We allow for quiet in our day. We breathe. We hug. We seek out the inspirational stories that remind us that our ideals are actually based in truth and reality. We distance ourselves from online shouting matches and accusatory finger-pointing. We look for quotes and images that sooth us. We reflect on five amazing things that occurred in our classroom that day and five incredible things that happened in our homes. We put ourselves to bed.

We take gentle steps towards healing ourselves and reestablishing solid footing around our level two needs. We ask for help when we need it. We take a time-out when we need it. We laugh hard again, because we need it.