white scars on blue with blood running down

Photo by Trent Yarnell on Unsplash

I dress my children red, white, and blue, because this is America and it’s what we do. Thick sunscreen smeared into upturned, scrunched up faces, painting light skin even whiter. So patriotic. I deserve a gold star for my efforts. Hand over heart, “O-oh say can you seeeeeeee¹,” and I don’t, I’m not even looking. My eyes are on the guns the old men have marched through town and into this cemetery. I feel my pulse through my loose woven shirt, still alive, still breathing. My other hand clutches my older daughter, the younger one held by my husband. They are hot, wilting like flowers. They don’t understand why this is important enough to stay in the sun for so long. I don’t either, but I’m here. This is Memorial Day, my sun-punished body and familiar words are a dutiful brick in the yearly national memorial we good citizens build. But I can’t stop eyeing those damn guns. “And the hooooooome of the braaaaaaaaaaaaave.” The wince-worthy high school band clangs to a finish and I bend to whisper in my daughter’s ear.

“They are going to shoot now, seven guns three times. But there’s no bullets, just noise. It’s called firing blanks. I’ll cover your ears, OK?”

She nods, too hot to care. A man’s voice now, unmodified and distant but still military issue, barking orders. I squeeze my palms to either side of her head, angle my body so she is shielded, just in case. I signal my husband with my eyes, but he’s already got our little one’s half-asleep head pressed to his chest, ears muffled. I am holding my breath and don’t even know it.

Crack.

I flinch. I swear it hit me. No, that was a boy in full uniform holding a balloon instead of a gun. His drill sergeant just popped it. We’ll make a man out of you, son. A threat and a promise. Now he’s holding the tattered fragments, sad little red flag on the string, deciding whether to throw it away or tuck it into his pocket. He looks so much younger like that.

Crack.

Another direct hit. No, that’s my brother getting spanked again. Or maybe it’s me, or one of my sisters. It’s a lonely humiliation, getting singled out for punishment. The rest of us keep our distance, glad it’s not us. There’s a special place my brother goes to cry so nobody sees him.

Crack.

This time he’s shooting the water snakes, all of them. I liked the harmless, grey-brown snakes, the way they glinted like mica-speckled rocks in the sun. I was angry about the snake massacre for years, until he finally told us that he’d uncovered an entire nest of them in an outbuilding. They had to go, every last one, with no reason given. Men are not supposed to be afraid of snakes. That just made me sad.

Crack.

A bone breaking, the national guardswoman fleeing her enlisted attacker. She still walks with a limp.

Crack.

It isn’t only women who are sexually assaulted, military or not.

Crack.

Sometimes words can be bullets, too. The ex-military martial arts guy sits his wife’s friend down to explain why you don’t say “I’ll kill you,” even joking, to someone with military training. There is such a thing as a physical trigger, and if you trip it, ka-boom. Be safe. Don’t joke like that with people trained to actually kill.

Crack.

Another veteran turns their well trained gun on themself. Another failed attempt to de-program and re-assimilate. Will they get a memorial, too?

Crack.

The bottle and the table, the bottle and the glass. They drink to forget. They drink to dull the pain. They drink to become softer, more empathetic and approachable versions of themselves. Destructive? yes, but could be worse. What do you do when the best you can do still feels like shit?

Crack.

That’s the mirror after he’s looked into it and seen his dad. Fuck it, now he’s got to get clean.

Crack.

Try to list the unseen wounds, the survival instincts honed to sharp points that don’t just go away when you no longer need them, try getting a medical discharge for that, and watch your band of brothers turn into sharks smelling blood. Is it human to hurt? Or is it just weakness?

Crack.

The girl who learns to hate her body after hearing her father tell his friend that she’s “never been that heavy, but…” That pause at the end? It stings worse than his belt ever did.

Crack.

The boy who was never as tough or athletic as his brothers. Softer qualities are only appreciated in girls. Do you have to change your gender just to be celebrated as yourself?

Crack.

The man who told shame researcher, Dr. Brene Brown, that his wife and daughter would rather see him dead than fallen from his white horse².

Crack.

The women who have not yet “earned” their worthiness by bringing a baby into the world, because that is what a woman was made for. What are you if your biology doesn’t function correctly?

Crack.

Air rushing into space burnt by words: a mother covering over the sin of her son by telling her daughter that an unmarried woman who gets in bed with a man deserves what she gets…men are coercive, and a good woman isn’t supposed to call it rape.

Crack.

The autistic man whose boss wants to know if he’s faking it.

Crack.

The woman who was fired because she was in a relationship with her boss and his boss found out…and promoted him.

Crack.

The woman who always feels alone because her trauma cycle means she spends months out of the year isolating in order to survive, and that’s hard on relationships.

Crack.

The parents faced with impossible decisions, knowing their child’s life hangs in the balance and either choice might be wrong.

Crack.

The boy who made the kind of unthinking decision unlucky or unprivileged boys go to prison for, and instead of owning his wrongness and making amends is terrified into lashing out in all directions and bullshitting his way out of trouble. It works, but some relationships will never be the same, and neither will he.

Crack.

Another boy walks into a school with two guns he bought for his birthday and shoots up an entire classroom, the fourth grade children and two teachers trying to shield them. When I read the articles, wanting to know but not understand, I tried not to see his face, the messy hair, the sullen eyes. I wanted to see a monster. I cried over the other pictures, the children far too young to have known the kind of mind shattering terror that must have marked their last moments, the kind of fear we hope our own kids never, ever experience.

I’m weeping into the silence that trails the last shot. It isn’t real. I’m not actually here this year, our plans changed and we’re missing Memorial Day in my hometown, but I swear I heard every individual shot. I shift my imaginary hand from my daughter’s imaginary ear and clutch her even tighter. We home school, I don’t have to send her back to class and pray through the hours with my heart in my throat, but this is still the world I have to send her out into one day, too soon, and not every mother has the choice to keep their kids home. I’m crying for the shooter, too. I can’t help it, dammit. He was one of those kids less than a decade ago, and now he’s just another angry dead boy, another hometown tragedy, another name that will be remembered with hatred and fear, another chance for gun control laws to maybe finally get enforced.

It’s like a damp clinging mist, like fetid swamp water. We drink it even though it makes us sick, because it’s all we know. I don’t want to hear war stories this Memorial Day, I just want to feel angry. I want to feel frustrated and conflicted and terrified and sad and devastated and hopefully a tiny bit hopeful. I feel like nothing will ever be quite right. Too many emotions coming too quickly to sort out, let alone process. I am grateful for the military, AND I detest the way it changes those who serve. I am all for keeping illegal weaponry out of the hands of unstable individuals, AND I believe that gun ownership is a right that should be protected, albeit with far stricter and better enforced regulations. I do not discount the overseas kind of battles that cost lives. I am grateful for soldiers, for veterans, for those who defend an imperfect, less-than-free country, but one in which the power of would-be tyrants is at least kept in check. I am grateful that enough people still sign up voluntarily that service is not mandatory, the way it is in some countries. I am grateful for the privilege that has given me choices—and innocence—that are a luxury to many. I am grateful, and yet…I can’t celebrate violence today, even necessary violence. It’s too much, it’s too soon. Today I just want to remember and celebrate the ordinary heroes, the small victories, the wounds that can be beautiful when we use them to forge connection, the courage that being that vulnerable demands of us, the bravery that it takes to say, “I don’t understand. Please tell me more. Please explain to me how it is for you.” How else will we ever free ourselves and each other from the shame?

Here, today, I plant a flag, a memorial to all these stories and more. On the flag…is a mirror. Nothing else. No symbol to be alternately cheered and booed and debated and fought over. Just yourself and your story. Just me and mine. I have been the one receiving the shame-bullet, and I have been impacted by every shot ever taken. That is the reality of interconnectedness. We know the wars we are individually and collectively fighting. We remember the battles we have fought and won; the battles we have backed away from, bleeding and scarred; the battles we are still fighting on a daily, weekly, yearly basis. So many of those battles are attempts to overcome our own shame programming, or pushing up against someone else’s shame buttons. To be truly free we must learn, as a society, a community, a family, to recognize and sit with our feelings, the light and the heavy ones. We must learn to face our own eyes in a mirror with gentleness. We must be brave enough to create safe spaces in which we can be vulnerable and authentic together. One thing we all have in common is our need to be seen and valued as we are, and we can no longer afford to continue treating that basic human right as a commodity with a tax that’s too high to pay. What will it take to finally make us realize that it’s the price of not seeing each other that is highest, and paid too often in blood? We drink the shame in, we feed it to others, and when someone pays the ultimate price we just add on more shame instead of sitting with the feelings and letting ourselves heal.

Am I making any sense? Is this too simple an answer? Undoing our own shame programming is, at best, an incomplete solution to an enormous, generational problem. But it’s a start³. Sometimes it seems like the world is spinning faster and faster every day, and when I don’t hold on tight enough I end up with skinned knees and palms and a bump on my dizzy head. What I hold onto is this idea I have of a life free of shame, for myself and everyone else. It is a beautiful world, where we are all equally valued as our authentic selves, free to embrace everything we were meant to be—and experience—in our short, spectacular lives. It is a safe world. And, it might be just a pipe dream, but it’s still a dream worth fighting for.

Taps fills the silence after the echo, the mournful notes chirp like birds saying goodnight. The veterans stand at attention, guns clutched like the hands of lost comrades. I reach out to touch my youngest daughter, her eyes closed and thumb in her mouth, resting against my husband. I feel the tug of the graves holding my baby brother and sister just a few dozen steps from here, my other daughter in another cemetery four hundred miles and a state line away. A memorial, or a day of remembrance, is not for the ones who are gone, but for the survivors. We are worth fighting for.

1. Lyrics taken from “The Star Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key. Originally a poem entitled, “In Defense of Fort M’Henry,” written September 14, 1814. I’m learning all kinds of interesting shit whilst dotting my sources.

2. I think that story is told in The Gifts of Imperfection. Brown, Brene. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazeldon Publishing. 2022. Originally published in 2010.

3. To learn more visit BreneBrown.com. Literally anything of hers is a good place to start—or continue—your un-shame training. I’m in the early stages still, but seriously, I’ve learned so much in just a few weeks.