Escape

My American readers will understand what it feels like to wake up on the morning after another mass shooting feeling sort of immobilized. You put one foot in front of the other. If you're lucky enough to have children you pick them up (if they're demanding 18 month olds), or comb their hair (if they're 10 year olds who are auditioning for Rapunzel) and you keep on keeping on.  You shove in the fears that physically manifest in a lump in your throat. Keep going.  Focus.  Stare at them to ground yourself. But careful, because if you stare too long and the insane beauty that you have been charged with protecting, you may catch your breath and fall apart.

If you're an American you also get your short but necessary summer vacation. It's time to escape at Casa de Justonemore, this year we're headed back to Vermont and then Montreal. A night in NYC with my parents, a long weekend in Vermont with cousins and their kids who live on the side of a mountain in paradise. Four days in Canada to explore a beautiful city with functional public transit that's the closest my brood will get to Europe for a while. Then back to Vermont for a few days of blissful relaxing by a pond. Nibble will likely close out her road-trip with a few extra days in NYC with my parents.

We all anesthetize ourselves with something. I've done it with food and exercise. Others in my family use alcohol. For this year's trip I decided to take advantage of the kindness of our cousins and plop our family down in the middle of a mountain, as a bookend to exploring a place I used to roam with my grandparents every summer of my childhood.

We happen live in a beautiful tree-lined walkable neighborhood on the northern edge of a city wracked by poverty and gun violence. The City that I call home was only just kicked out of the news cycle because of El Paso and Dayton mass murders. But even in our upper middle class haven, the violence and desperation touches us.  One of my closest friends lost her closest friend to a murder by gun a few days ago. Public school will be starting soon. Nibble attends a fantastic, but underfunded neighborhood school. I work in a section of the city plagued by addiction right outside my office door. "They lean," Nibble says, as she visits me at work regularly. "You can tell who is high on drugs because of the leaning." The reality of living in urban America is stark, even when you can afford to escape it.

I wish everyone peace right now. And strength. These have traditionally been the wishes I have offered for all of my friends suffering from infertility and loss. But it's so clear that the very special brand of PTSD I've suffered isn't so special after all.