Our Sons

I think it was the Skittles that really broke my heart. Trayvon Martin had Skittles candy and a bottle of tea in his hand-it's the same thing Aaron picks out when we stop for gas or a snack on the way home from school sometimes. Children are killed in our country, children are brutally murdered in our country every year. That is a sad, but true fact and those murders often make headlines. Why have I felt Trayvon Martin's death so personally? I think it is because, as I said on Facebook one day, he could be my son. My son, only a few years younger, plays sports, loves Skittles, watches the NBA and doesn't always make the wisest of decisions. My son loves wearing hoodies. Walking to a nearby store at night for candy, even if it was ill advised, would be the type of decision I could see Aaron making. So I could easily see this boy as my son, or one of his friends. As a mother I can only imagine the pain another mother is, and has been, feeling this past month. It wrenches my soul. There is no greater sorrow than to lose a child, and to lose one in such a senseless and terrible way must bring both pain and anger I can't even fathom.

Is anger the way we should react? I have anger. I have anger with myself that this story made headlines for weeks before I learned about it...on Twitter....from LeBron James. Really? Am I an adult? But at least I learned. I talked about it with my children. My son, who looked at the pictures of the Heat in their hoodies and wanted to take one himself. My daughter, only two years younger than Trayvon, would have gone to school with him in a different place. They discuss it in her social studies class. I wonder about those discussions, in a school where she has heard the word n**** used in the hall as a racial slur numerous times.
I don't know exactly what happened in that neighborhood on that night, but I know a child died. I don't know if his attire, or his skin color, had anything to do with it. Hopefully, these things will be answered over the weeks to come and will be reported to us openly and honestly.
I've already said Trayvon somehow reminded me a bit of my son.Would the color of my son's skin save him on a dark night in a neighborhood? I don't know. It's a question I've asked myself, I think it's a question maybe many of us have asked ourselves. Perhaps it's a question, or a fact, that has allowed some of us to distance ourselves from this case. To not be as outraged as we should. It's an uncomfortable task, to examine your own deepest prejudices, to examine the racial bias of your community or country. I don't know where this country needs to go from here, but I know this-if I have any more children they would look much more like Trayvon than their brother and sister. And I know this, if those children would not be safe because of their skin color on that same street than this is an America I don't want to live in. If those children would not have every opportunity because of their skin color as the two I already have, then it's an America I don't want to live in.
In the America I want to live in, they will be treated exactly the same in school, have the same opportunity to go to the college they choose, succeed in the career they want, have a family. In the America I want to live in, young men can walk down a street and not be shot-not by young men of their own race, not by men protected by misguided "self defense laws", not by any sort of statistic just waiting to make the nightly news. But the America I live in...has some work to do and we should not need the death of a child to remind us. Perhaps if we are willing to ask the hard questions and learn the hard lessons, we can build a better country for the family Trayvon Martin left behind and the families yet to come.

**Footnote: (all references to any future children are hypothetical, Mom. I'm not having any more kids at this time or in the foreseeable future)