Our Darkest Fears

We were in the car one early spring afternoon toward the end of Colum’s junior kindergarten year.

“We practiced lockout at school today,” he said.

Lockout? I was puzzled. Like a labour lockout?

“Are your teachers going on strike?” I said, even though that didn’t make sense either.

“No, it’s in case some crazy person with a gun comes to the school. We have to lock the door and hide under our desks with the curtains closed.”

“Oh! Lockdown!”

And then my synapses started misfiring. Why on earth was my four-year-old son being subjected to routine lockdown drills?! This is Toronto, Canada. We have gun control. There has never been a single shooting incident in a Canadian elementary school. The handful of school shootings that have occurred have been at the high school or college level and were almost all committed by students of the school. (In one instance it was a professor.) Surely the fear stemming from the possibility of an attack by a crazed gunman is more damaging than the vanishingly small odds that anything like that would ever happen at our school. Has the whole world become paranoid delusional?

I understand and appreciate having to buzz in and speak with the office staff via intercom before being let into the building. It was an annoyance when I was pregnant, but I also understand why adults aren’t allowed to use the school washrooms. I guess I even get why the kids have to buddy up whenever they need to use the washroom. (Although Irene does tell me, “Mommy, sometimes we don’t go pee. Sometimes we just dance and dance.”) But isn’t this going too far? Lockdown drills? Really?

And then I heard the breaking news out of Connecticut this morning. There was a shooting at an elementary school. An unknown number of children and teachers are injured and dead. It’s still early; nothing is confirmed. It looks like there were two gunmen and one of them (the shooter) was the father of one of the students. It’s an unspeakable tragedy. It’s horrific.

So I don’t know anymore. Maybe these lockdown drills help. Maybe they don’t. Maybe we do these lockdown drills because then at least we’re doing something. At the very least we can try to believe we are doing something to keep our children safe in a world seemingly full of lunatics. Maybe then we can sleep at night.

Maybe they’ll help, too, when I have sit down and explain what happened to my children. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think they need to know. But Colum heard about the Eaton Centre shooting from someone at school and that could very well happen again. So I want to be the one to tell them what happened. I want to be the one to reassure them that nothing like this could ever happen to them. It won’t happen to us, we say.

And then we pray like hell that we’re right.

Post Script: After thinking about it, reading this post by Jessica Gottlieb, thinking about it some more and discussing it with my husband, I have decided not to tell any of the kids about the shooting. We will be prepared to talk about it if anyone (most likely, Colum) comes home from school on Monday with questions. But with any luck, that won’t be necessary.