🎄Christmas music blaring on the radio … I was feeling JOY.
đź’šThen suddenly … it happened. The trigger that deflated the joy and made my eyes well up with grief.
A simple song the DJ played right after the Christmas cheer – Coldplay – Fix you. And I sobbed like it was that day all over again.
You know you can have post traumatic symptoms to trauma that you weren’t even actually IN but you felt?
My entire area of Connecticut can tell you this. Every year we try to seek joy in the season – every year we hold our breath to when the heavy silence of that day that changed our lives forever – sneaks in and breaks us again.
Lord have mercy it broke me driving that day/ I heard the song that was played to a tribute of the community that had literally palpable pain when you walked through it/ the tribute video that honored beautiful shockingly young lives lost as well as hero adults/ the video made in tribute of a town I live next door too and now work in.
Every year I wait to see what it will be that will trigger it. Every year is comes in like a storm and holds my heart.
Every year I ponder – what have we learned and done different?
We have locked up our schools like they are jails. We have practiced scary drills. We have lobbied for better common sense gun laws.
But do you know what the average parent sending their kid to school doesn’t see? ….
The enormity of mental illness happening without any resources.
The staff going into those schools that every day think about what they would do if this would happen again.
You know what the schools super security doesn’t protect us from? Those suffering from mental illness IN the building.
I arrived at a place where I felt I was doing more hurting then helping as a school social worker.
Not because my heart was off or I didn’t do great work …
But because our systems FAIL every single day.
From the very top of the government – down to the child in the public school classroom- we lack funding and adequate mental health resources. And my field of professionals are now quickly made into only working in crisis as a reactive agent – instead of a proactive one.
Not to mention as a parent who had some very trying years with a very sick mentally ill son – the only way I got him help was my own money (insurance wouldn’t cover it) and knowing my own rights. Many – TO MANY – families do not have this honor.
I hear the horror cry for the gun laws I DO.
But my friends – where is the battle cry for mental health resources?
Why aren’t we ANGRY and lobbying for that reform too?
If we are going to go all in when it comes to true change – not just bullet proof glass on the outside of our schools – we need to be doing the fighting in ALLLLLL the arenas.
I think about that day – and how my now 13 year old is alive simply because I chose to live in a different town and area that is only mere miles from those who didn’t. I look at my second grader – innocent and sweet- wondering how those babies felt that day.
And I honor my grieving heart for their families.
I send all three of my kids off to school everyday in FEAR but in faith they will return because … I know first hand the brokenness that is happening behind closed doors that the educators are not able to speak about.
We need mental health reform ASAP.
We need to save more babies.
We need to be outraged that funding isn’t available for our most vulnerable.
Our hearts will never be the sameđź’š
seekingup
Seeking Up 
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