Motherscope LLC | San Diego, CA motherscope.com Cover Illustration by Alexandra Harvey | Mothershaped The Mom Salon logo by Samantha Acker | Gemini Designs Copyright © 2021 by Motherscope LLC and the individual contributors. All rights reserved. Leonard, Jackie (editor) The Mom Salon | June 2021 The Mom Salon features the writings of Motherscope’s 2021 Contributors, appearing in rotation from Mar. 2021 through Feb. 2022: Kate Bailey, Eunice Brownlee, Kelsey Cichoski, Heather Cleaves, Laci Hoyt, Micah Klassen, Shanthy Milne, Alyssa Nutile, Holly Ruskin, Kaitlin Solimine, Colleen Tirtirian, Megan Vos, Melaina Williams
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In This Month’s Mom Salon: Megan Vos | Part of Our Story Now
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Holly Ruskin | Sorry // .
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Melaina Williams | Snapped Back and Other Poems
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Alyssa Nutile | I Hide Behind My Children
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CONTENT GUIDANCE “Part of Our Story Now” (p. 1-5): recent mass shooting “Sorry //.” (p. 8): postpartum anxiety, rage
Part of Our Story Now By Megan Vos First, we heard the sirens. My daughters were doing somersaults on the trampoline, the mountains looming beneath the gray March sky. I sat on the swing, watching their tricks, chilly even in a down jacket, wishing it felt more like spring. The neighborhood was sleepy; it was spring break, lousy weather, and the sirens seemed especially loud in the absence of other sounds. “There must be a car accident,” my six-year-old said. “Yup,” I replied. “I hope everyone is okay.” I glanced at my phone and saw a text from a friend. She’d heard on a scanner that there was an active shooter at the Table Mesa King Soopers, a third of a mile from our house. In that instant, I felt like I was moving in slow motion, watching myself from above the backyard. “Oh my god, there’s a shooter at King Soopers,” I said breathlessly. My nine-year-old looked up, eyes wide. I caught myself. “I mean, there might be someone dangerous. Let’s go inside.” But my daughters had heard it — they’d heard the word “shooter.” We went in, and I locked the doors and texted my husband, who had gone back to work in person a couple of weeks before. The girls moved on to a game, and I felt relieved that for the moment, they did not need me to process with them. I could already sense that that would come later, though I had no idea about the scope of the tragedy yet. I sat glued to my phone, unable to escape the sirens, which would blare for hours, or the news helicopters circling above our home. The Table Mesa Plaza, where King Soopers is located, is home to the brewery where we took my older daughter for our first postpartum outing, when I craved an Annapurna Amber in my early hazy breastfeeding days. The kids’ art studio my girls attend regularly, their finished pieces decorating most surfaces of our house. An ice cream parlor that we visit often, my girls marching up to the window to order without looking at the flavors, reciting their regular orders like a mantra. My favorite breakfast spot, where I always have the scramble with bacon, green chiles, and
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cheddar and a Boulder Latte, the best coffee in Boulder. The pizza place that was the answer to my girls’ teething woes: a slice for me, extra chewy crust for them, which they’d gnaw from the stroller as I pushed them home. Our vet, our pharmacy, our liquor store, our bagel shop. The small play structures throughout the plaza — a slide, a climbing wall, some big rocks — that punctuate outings for errands. I’ve gone to King Soopers at 2 a.m. for Infants’ Tylenol; at 5 a.m. with a sleepless baby for Starbucks; hundreds of times for a full grocery shop or a rotisserie chicken or a gallon of milk. My girls loved riding in the car carts — behemoths that took superhuman strength to push — and the free sugar cookies in the bakery section. Before COVID, there were mechanical horses at the front of the store, and the cashiers would hand out pennies when they saw kids approaching in line. As I’d choose a checkout lane, my girls would say “Meet you at the horses!” and scamper over, watching for me, and also giddy in their independence. In the three weeks since the shooting, I have had countless conversations with friends about how we are talking with our children about it. Some were out that afternoon and had to detour around police barricades and take back ways to their homes, passing the high school where the medical helicopters — later sent home because there were no injuries, only casualties — were waiting. Some were on spring break, and had to witness the tragedy from afar, sharing the news with their children in the mountains, or at the beach, or as their flights landed, and they knew their kids would see the chain link fence around the store, and the memorial that had developed while they were gone. Initially, I felt ashamed of the way my kids found out. I told the story of blurting out the news of a shooter again and again. But when I think back to that afternoon, I can meet myself with more compassion now. I didn’t know that there was a lone shooter. I didn’t know if gunmen were roaming our neighborhood. I did not have the luxury of curating talking points, or planning how and what to reveal. I have been thinking about my childhood, and about my own exposure to sad or scary events, as I have helped my daughters to process the shooting. While the news is undoubtedly more pervasive now than it was when I was little, I saw more news as a child than my daughters do now. My parents watched both the local news and “World News Tonight” with Peter Jennings many nights, and I can remember watching too. I watched the Challenger explosion when I was in preschool, on a television
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