To speak my truth...

Hello friends, hope you're well. I've got some new internet-digs and I want to invite you all over. You may notice that Everyday Truth-Telling is a different site than my usual site, Life as a Lego Giraffe. I've switched. Short story is that the phrase "everyday truth-telling" came to me a few months ago and just stuck around, and seemed to sum up exactly what I want my presence on this little web space to be about. Telling the truth about everyday life. My truth, at least. So, www.everydaytruthtelling.com was born and here I am and hopefully you'll come visit from time to time, if not more often.

You'll notice that I have a crap-ton of posts from June 2016. Well, for all the wonderful things that Squarespace v6 does well, it doesn't transfer blogs from one Squarespace site to another. So I went through and just re-posted all of my old www.lego-giraffes.com posts last weekend. The original post month/year is listed in parenthesis in each post title. 

Anyway.

I'm not going to lie, I wasn't sure what to say after the events of this past week. When I first learned about the Orlando nightclub shooting I felt something in me shut down. I couldn't engage with the terribleness of what happened - it's like my heart sent a message to my head and said, "This is too much! We can't handle this kind of heartbreak! Don't process, don't react! System failure will occur!" That happens from time to time when I am faced with the news of tragedies. On the outside it looks like it didn't even register, but on the inside my heart is bursting and doing everything to not shatter. 

It wasn't until Wednesday night that I finally broke down and spent a good five minutes sobbing - massive sobbing - on the floor of our bathroom. Then I went outside and spent an hour weeding our front yard. Weeding is constructive destruction - it was exactly what I needed.

It isn't just the sadness, though. I'm angry. I am really, really angry. I am angry that there are people who respond to loss of life by way of a gun with the platitude (and is this even a platitude at all?), "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." And then that's it. They wave their 2nd Amendment in our faces and effectively tell the rest of us that their right to buy whatever firearm they very well please whenever they want to have it is more important than my right, as a fellow American, to live without the threat of being gunned down at any place, any time. 

That makes me angry.

I am angry that after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered fellow students and teachers in Littleton, Colorado in 1999 gun laws have actually gotten more lax. And I am angry that I still know those two names at the drop of a hat. 

I am angry that so many people in power think it is perfectly acceptable - just a fact of life - that a classroom of first graders can be slaughtered. I can't even access the reality of Sandy Hook - it is so completely abhorrent and awful and there-are-no-words-horrific - but it wasn't bad enough to inspire any kind of change. At all.

After these terrible tragedies people respond with #prayfor... Well, we either aren't praying hard enough or we're not actually praying at all. What if people who typed #prayfor actually did pray? What if millions and millions of people actually prayed for gun reform, every day, for a lot of days? I believe that would change things. I just don't think we're actually following through. That makes me angry, too.

And all this anger makes me exhausted. Exhausted to the point that I can feel myself giving up, accepting the reality that our country is massively messed up and it's just going to keep getting worse. That stupidity rules and will just keep taking over. This whole Trump nonsense just confirms this, right? And then I get angry again, remembering that AMERICA IS MY COUNTRY, TOO and I want what's best for it and us. The NRA wants you to believe that real patriotism is simply blind allegiance to the 2nd Amendment, and it alone. I disagree. 

The Senate filibuster on Wednesday has raised my hopes that changes might actually be on the horizon. Not soon enough, but maybe. Maybe THIS tragedy will be enough to effect real change. 

So, those are just a few of my thoughts - a bit of my truth - from this week. It's been a busy one. We finished up our second week of our new life - my new job, Owen's new daycare - and Owen and I are both sick. The joys of daycare! But really, daycare has been awesome. O just jumped in like a natural. And the other day Owen started feeding himself with a fork, all on his own! Just like that, he's all grown up. 

 Okay, that's enough for now. Kind of a mish-mash of everyday truths.

Be well, friends.