Mamas Raise Your Babies To Be Kind

This weekend a little boy died as a result of a gunshot wound he received while he was heading out the door to recess. He wasn't a victim of a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting in a bad neighborhood. He was walking out of a door of his school to play with his friends at what is typically the best part of a 6-year-olds day. That is what the world has turned into.

As a mother, I spend 90% of my day fighting off irrational fears. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to triple check that the doors are locked just in case my toddler tries to escape half asleep. I break out into a cold sweat wondering if she swallowed too much water in the pool, thanks to those articles everyone overshares all summer about second-hand drowning.

I've come to accept many things. Like that fact that I can't let me child roam the streets all day and return when the streetlights come on, like her father and I once could. How people who used to praise and idolize her Papa's job as a police officer, now view him as enemy #1. That whenever I think about boarding a plane with my family my chest will tighten up. Or even how we will most likely find a used syringe at the playground. However, I will never accept that I need to worry about my daughter running out to the playground only to be shot.

I am not an expert on any subject, let alone gun violence. I don't blame guns because you can not blame an object for anything. I blame humans. We have become this world that has stopped caring about anyone or anything, other than ourselves. Well, that isn't true, the nation almost shut down for two days because two celebrities got a divorce. I suppose we still care, just not about what we should. We are so wrapped up in petty issues that we allow important ones to be placed on the backburner.

A 6-year-old died. He was a son, brother, friend....and 6 years old. I don't have a solution to make this stop. Stricter gun laws? Maybe...but the shooter was a 14-year-old so making it harder to get a gun wouldn't have stopped him, just as it probably wouldn't stop most gun violence we read about. However, this isn't a debate for gun laws, because what do I know....maybe it would help maybe it wouldn't. This isn't even me screaming we need a mental health reform, even though this child clearly was in need of help. This is simply a mother's plea for you to wake up! I'm begging you to be kind to people and to care about things that matter.

I haven't even lived for 30 years, yet the time from when I was a kid to now have changed so much. I still remember Columbine and the fear it caused. How that single event shook an entire nation to its core. Now we seem numb to it. This last school shooting gained some media coverage but not a ton, maybe it's because it wasn't a mass casualty.... and Americans well we like everything more on a larger scale. However I can tell you one thing, I bet it made every mama hold their babies a little tighter and gave us yet another sleepless night.

So again I beg you to start caring and to teach your kids to care. I fail daily at being a mom. There are nights I'm so tired I forget to brush her teeth or yell a little too loudly for something small. Some days our screen time in unlimited and the other day I dropped a certain curse word in front of her because I slammed my little toe into a metal trunk. None of us are perfect, but this world so desperately needs us to raise our babies to care and to be kind...maybe more so now than ever.