It’s taking everything in me not to pack my bags and head to my daughter’s college, where a shooting has locked down the campus through the night. She answers my desperate texts with one- and two- word responses, just enough to honor a pre-agreed communications protocol left over from the teen years. She does not want to talk. She does not want to brief me on developments or keep me “in the loop.” She wants to hunker down with the rest of her housemates, follow university alerts, and immerse herself in the unfolding drama.

Because the incident occurred nearby, I suspect they will hear sirens all day. Lots of commotion, coming and going. Social media fairly smoking it’s on such overuse. Classes cancelled. But there’s no joy in that. This is not a snow day, or a tornado watch or hurricane. This is not a pandemic. No, human events can cap natural disaster any day of the week. They know their classmates aren’t as lucky. In a sort of sick version of freeze tag, some are “sheltering in place” where they were when shots fired: in a library carrel studying, in a lab or dining hall. Some have been shepherded into basements of classroom buildings by faculty or other university administrators, others have been yanked off the sidewalks into the nearest building. Shelter in place… shelter in place …shelter in place. But there is no shelter. It is a long, sleepless night and in the morning, no resolution: active shooter still at large.

Of course, they want us to stay away. Of course, they want us to follow guidelines from official channels only. Let the emergency personnel and law enforcement work freely. The families of the victims can’t even get in to identify their slain children. All is on hold for a systematic manhunt. Ruefully I think, well there’s something. She’s already had her house searched once by police at gun point in the middle of the night, so a manhunt will be old hat. Last semester, she and a housemate were accosted in their own driveway by two men who followed them to their door. You try telling her father we’ll wait till the weekend to ride out there. He’s halfway down the road to buy out the “home security” aisle at the hardware store and head out to rig her rental tighter than a safehouse.

Because I’m a modern mom, or I try to be, I have the college’s alert system on my cell phone. So I know the minute she does that there are reports of shots fired. And I know that the suspect is at large. They text updates about every 30 minutes until the situation is resolved. Usually, it’s gas leaks. This one, around 3 am: Armed suspect at large. RUN. HIDE. FIGHT. “Run, hide, Fight.” I don’t know why these three little words unglue me. What is that??! It sounds like a game-day chant. Like “Rah! Rah?” “No mom,” she explains. “It’s the order of response. First, you run, and if you can’t run then you hide, and if you can’t hide—well, then, you fight.” You fight?

To ask where she learned this code will break your heart. Recently substituting in our neighborhood elementary school, the one this college junior attended, I was part of intruder drill training. Code blue. Four fifth grade classes out of the playground on a crisp fall morning, and we are teaching them to run into the woods. Over and over with the whistle blow, the children leapt from their swings, their slides and jungle gyms, their giggling courtyard groupings and Pokeman swaps, and they raced from their play into the woods as fast and far from the building as their ten-year-old legs could carry them. It was surreal. I tried to copy the other teachers yelling commands, “Run! This way! Quick, quick, RUN!” but my voice caught in my throat and I could not speak at all. I stood there squinting in the sun and I tried not to collapse with the pre-grief that comes with parenting these days. I find I am all too ready and poised for days like this one. Gone the days of “hop, skip, jump,” and all their sing-song-y playground chants and rhymes. So says my sis. Now we sing a new song: Run. Hide. Fight. My heart is wired on motion-sensors and sirens. Like that safehouse.

I’ll give you fight. That’s exactly what I want to tell the university. I want to scale walls, climb into windows, and pull my kids out of the burning building. I want to grab all of them from the life-threatening act of…attending school…and head for the hills. But I must settle down and listen to my child. My 20-year-old child. She doesn’t want to come home. She doesn’t want to leave. For this story has an underlay, a foundation that is as real and resounding as the tragedies they experience. Resilience, is the word they will use. These are the children born out of the ashes of 2001, after all, coming into life as the stability and boundaries of humanity were collapsing. If ever there were a phoenix generation, it is these. These are the children of 2020, never having to wonder what next good thing would be ripped from their grasp, because it was already done. They “graduated” into a world gone stark raving mad. This is the 68th school shooting on school grounds this year, the 15th on a college campus. “How are you doing?” I will text her the day after this, checking in throughout the day. She will not come home, and I will not, after all, go there. “I’m OK. But right now it feels like a lot to leave my room.”

One of the things I learned from her freshman year is that having a mom is no credence at all. You got the “once they turn 18” speech as well, I assume. “Mom” means nothing in college world (well, I take that back, it means something for the week proceeding a tuition bill-paying deadline, but for the rest of the time, nothing). I am now in that phase of life where I am supposed to step back and let the world kick, hurt, disappoint, rob, and harden my children, and I am supposed to like it. In a rather counter-intuitive move, you pack up your beloveds with all their gear and you drive them away to a place far less safe or stable than your own home and then you actually, intentionally, help them set up shop there with pretty homegoods (so, what–they’ll feel at home??!) and then you make a few half-hearted jokes in the doorway, a few last desperate pleas — “Pleeeeze don’t go jogging alone, make sure you eat well, wear your mask,” and then you get back in your now empty car and drive back to your now emptier house, and then you pay someone thousands of dollars to keep up this bizarre arrangement. And when they call with a bombed exam or job they didn’t get or hiking club that was full by the time they got to it, you think of that helicopter parked in the garage and it takes everything in you not to start ‘er up. Seriously, who lets a perfectly good helicopter go begging in today’s world?

But no, I have to walk a new walk, take a page from the “you’ve got this” aura the university is projecting. I have to talk a new talk, say things like “That stinks, I am so sorry for you,” when what I really mean is Gimme a name and number so I can fix it. And “That sounds so unfair, I’m sorry that happened,” when I really mean Hold my coffee please while I …. I know the code has always been this way, even from the first days of skinned knees and playground bullies, but the ride in that Apache attack copter was so fine. And anyway, the people who made up those ridiculous labels and dictated the parenting rules were blissfully able to raise theirs before mass shootings, an opioid crisis—and now, for goodness sake, raging racial discontent, political upheaval, wildfires lowering our statehood and upping our lung issues for generations, a planet that is so warm in places it’ll never be habitable again, ever, and an insidious and unrelenting deadly global pandemic. For real? Helicopter parent? How ’bout I push over and give you a seat on the last ride out before the Armageddon? Get over yourself already. You can thank me later.

I’ve always thought that “Just lemme make a phone call” is the caring parent’s extension to “have you brushed your teeth?” But it’s not. It’s a trespass on their emerging personhood. Somewhere along the line the child comes to want the unmitigated cruelty of the world undiluted. Unbuffered. To herself. For herself. Because that is what constitutes (young) adulthood: I can go it alone. That’s what their leave-taking is all about. And it doesn’t take long for life to unleash its other lesson: Now, enter the tragedies. Cue the disasters. Tonight, after this lock-down, after the events of today, after the press conferences and media posts, they will gather on the campus lawn by the hundreds, maybe thousands, for a candlelight vigil. All of these shocked and grief stricken not-going-home people who look like adults and feel like children will slowly, numbly come together. Banners and posters and flowers and tributes piled higher than the fall leaves. Sea of young promise, mourning its own. And their newly acquired wisdom twinkling in every candle: I could go it alone, but I don’t want to.

Photo by Zino Bang on Pexels.com