It’s mid-morning, and you’re a thousand miles away from home when your phone rings. The caller ID tells you it’s your kids’ school, and your stomach drops. It’s been a week since Parkland, and only two days since the police declared a lockdown at your kids’ school after a credible threat was phoned in.
In a minute, you’ll find out that this isn’t that worst nightmare. It’s a different one.
You’ll turn your car around and drive back to the airport to catch the next flight home, and you’ll forget to eat both lunch and dinner because you’re using the entirety of your brain to try and make sense of what you’ve just heard. You’ll arrive back home after everyone is asleep, then lie awake for hours cycling through blame, laying it at the feet of each person you know before dismissing that possibility and moving on to the next. A kind child psychologist will spend hours on the phone with you, letting you ramble through each hypothetical and offering sound wisdom on how to talk to your child in a way that won’t alarm him.
In the morning, when your six-year old wakes up, you’ll ask him casually, “Have you ever heard of this game called ‘privates’?”
