Mary's Pain

My little 27 pound blue eyed blonde atomic bomb worth of energy nearly 4 year old asked me, "Mom, why can't I have a toy gun?"
Because guns are not toys. Guns are not safe.
"But I just want to play bad guys," insert puss n boots eyes.
I know, but sometimes people make mistakes and think that good guys playing bad guys ARE bad guys.
"No they won't.  They'll know I'm just a kid."
So much innocence...I looked at him. I REALLY looked at him and saw the truth in what he said.
He is the Aryan wet dream.
Every buried SS Deathshead signet ring twitches for a chance to corrupt his little finger.
My son has the luxury of being a kid because of the random genetics that color his skin.
I have the privilege of knowing that no one will use backwoods stereotypes to falsify a crime to justify an immediately carried out death sentence.
When my phone rings, it won't be someone telling me to come identify his body.
The fluorescent orange tip of what is now the defacto symbolism for being a man will not mock me as I bite my own tongue to keep from screaming, "He was just a boy!"
WAS.
I will not follow his last steps on earth through the lense of a body cam,
to watch him walk the gauntlet from dead man walking to victim to posthumous criminal. A swaying crucifix in the wind.  
So many mothers have pulled the nails out of soft palms of dead children.
They've cradled them and endured the time lapse photograph aging of a face that stopped forever on that day and began to exist only in yesterdays.

We desire to live in sepia toned photos and keep the future always behind us.
We love them because they don't change, they just fade into hazy memories.
Memories can be erased with dollar signs just like the minds of jury, to turn a blind eye when those dollar signs change circumstantial to factual with a gilded stamp of approval.
But people are not statistics.
People are not circumstances.
In fact, most people are in their current circumstances because statistics are so easily manipulated and rarely ever measure anything relevant.
Life is not black and white.
Life is not fair,
but too many people know what it feels like to watch a white hand push them back behind the glass of a barrier built just for them...and most of them are children.

I believe in the Virgin Mary in that her pain and the fear of her pain lives in the heart of every mother.
Every.single.one.
Every woman that gave every last thing to nourish a seed only to watch it suffer.
The potential to be an ocean,  a mountain, an omen of change, the magnum opus of a lifetime, gone, along with the hopes and dreamsx pieces of her soul and all of the love a heart built on the bones of Queens of long ago could provide, passing down the sacred rite.
Blood to blood.
Love from love.
Sorrow also swims in this river.
Women have always had to decide whether to hide their children or let them get swept up in the next tide of intolerance, do they fight or do they die or do they die fighting?
There is no right choice and grief is the only friend left and when it becomes to heavy yo breathe let alone speak,  she is accused by a greasy haired orange tinted snake of having nothing to say.
There is everything to say.
But words are hard to find when you sit alone in a forest of corpses.
Youth drained, collected in cups and sold to the rich as privilege.
What is there to say when hands trace a stone cold angel face her heart would now even in the dark?
This is Mary's pain. This is our burden and curse.

So all children are of my blood because I took the oath of motherhood.
As long as I must help carry dead children home and a mother weeps alone in the darkness,
my answer to "Can I have a gun? " will always be "No."