Clint Smith: No Parent Should Have to Live Like This

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Clint Smith
@ClintSmithIII
I spent last week thinking about what it means to be Black in a country where people hunt you & livestream your murder. I’ll now spend this week thinking about what it means to be a parent in a country where your child may not come home from school alive.

theatlantic.com
No Parent Should Have to Live Like This
I spent last week mourning those murdered in Buffalo. I will spend this week mourning children murdered at school.
7:52 AM · May 25, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/school-gun-violence-robb-elementary-uvalde/638422/

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https://archive.ph/IiBVx

Four days ago, I filled out the paperwork to register my son for kindergarten. After I sent the email—filled with attachments of IDs, birth certificates, proofs of residence, and immunization records—I turned to my wife and said in the ultimate parent cliché, “They really grow up so fast.”

I picked up my phone and began scrolling through photos of my son from the day he was born, almost five years ago, his pink-brown body awash with wrinkles and wonder. I kept scrolling and saw photographs of him in the crib where he slept (and too often did not sleep); photographs of him chasing a flock of birds in the park, his arms raised as he toddled toward them with breathtaking inelegance; photographs of him after he had applesauce for the first time, his eyes gleaming, his smile as wide as the sky, his lips covered in a chaos of golden mush.

The school where my son will attend kindergarten is just a few minutes’ walk away from our house. The other day (when his preschool class was closed because of a COVID case) we walked there during lunchtime so that he could see the students at “the big-kid school” he would be attending come fall.

The scenes were as you would imagine at an elementary school during recess. Soccer balls bounced against legs and grass and gates as a group of children chased the balls around with little regard for who was on whose team. Kids slid down the slide in every fashion—backwards, forward, headfirst on their backs, headfirst on their stomachs—before tumbling to the mulch waiting at the bottom and then running back up to do it all over again. Some chased one another with sticks, pretending to be wizards or superheroes or wizards who were superheroes. My son was thrilled by all of this. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Elementary school is a place where innocence abounds, where laughter ricochets off the walls in constant, endless cascades.

*snip*