Connect

Three weeks ago, on September 17 at 8:42 pm, I got a message through my kids’ school district’s communication portal and via email. In a nutshell, this notice said “congratulations to us. We found an objectionable book and pulled it off the shelves of our schools.” And then included the violent, graphic, sexually explicit passage.

So basically, I got an email ostensibly about protecting children from this graphic depiction of child rape and incest—and that same depiction, I soon learned, was read aloud at a public school board meeting, publicly accessible on the school district’s website in the transcript of the remarks, and linked from the school district’s official (public) Facebook page, all of these, of course, are accessible to students.

More specifically, what we expect mothers to tolerate before we consider their suffering legitimate. 

I want to be very clear up front: I did not watch the trial. I haven’t watched the news since 2016, and I struggle to stay on top of the news generally given the pace of developments in the last few years. I’ve educated myself on the gist and high level summaries of this case (the best summaries I’ve found are from PBS, The Guardian, and the BBC), but I am not coming at you to comment on the facts, or even argue for a particular outcome, even though you probably know me well enough at this point to know I have an opinion. But there are things to process here, and things we need to see as humans so we can try not to repeat them. I feel physically ill for her kids, heartbroken in the most piercing way. 

But I feel physically ill for her, too. 

If your kids, like mine, go back to school when it’s still hotter than the devil’s undercarriage, then happy first day of school! As my youngest said when she popped her head up after a wave knocked her over in the ocean this summer: “I made it! I didn’t die!”