After Shawn and I divorced I began to hear stories from the kids about guns their Daddy had bought and how he liked going to the mountains to shoot at targets.
Of course this was frightening to me, someone who did not grow up around guns, because of Shawn's history of cold rage towards me, past suicidal threats, and what appeared to be continued instability.
But what was I to do? The guns were reportedly locked away from the kids and I was no longer married to him, thus ending any powers of persuasion I had previously had when he talked about buying a gun.
When Lennon was born I had decided, when he was old enough, we would go together and learn the proper way to handle and fire guns. I never wanted to teach my kids that guns are BAD - I wanted them to know that guns are very powerful tools and that they are perfectly appropriate when used by policeman for protecting people and by people hunting for food. My mantra always was "tools not toys".
I had heard rumblings of "Daddy buying me a BB gun for my 10th birthday" from Lennon and I could see that it was probably only a matter of time before Shawn took him shooting in the mountains. And this worried me immensely.
The weekend before my birthday the L's and I went camping with R.
At the campground there was a group of "rough-and-tumble" boys with realistic looking toy guns who were going on great adventures and pretending to hunt "bad guys" in the woods. Lennon, my sweet boy who never made a pretend gun out of a toy stick or showed any interest in violent stereotypical boy games (he always preferred to read and study his maps) had already started to reach the age where he was wanting to separate from his Mom and begged desperately to play along. As I recall, I let him play for awhile but when I saw him point a toy gun at someone in the game I had a little mommy-meltdown and made him come back to the campsite - something he was not happy about.
R. grew up on a ranch where they used guns for a variety of purposes. R, who I trust inherently to protect the L's and me, had brought her little .22 rifle with us on the camping trip. We had talked in advance and said that I could decide if the time was right for us to learn about gun safety and if it wasn't we would wait. We hadn't even told the kids we had the rifle with us.
On the morning of the 28th of August I decided that, as queasy as it made me feel, it was time we had a lesson on gun safety - especially in light of the evidence that Lennon was becoming more interested in what this whole gun thing was about as a way to bond with his Dad and other boys.
R. gave us a professor style lecture before the rifle was even out of the case, then we practiced handling the gun without any bullets, and then we hung the targets on distant tree and loaded the rifle.
As I recall, I went first, heart pounding, and then Lennon and then finally Lily got the courage.
Lennon got a bulls-eye on one of his first shots and was so proud. And, really, we all felt so proud that we had accomplished something that had been a little intimidating.
As we drove home it dawned on me that I was probably going to have to tell Shawn, before the kids excitedly told him, that I had taken them shooting for the first time. And that he would definitely be angry at me for doing this and "stealing" that fatherly/manly opportunity.
I knew he wouldn't understand why I did it - that it was out of fear that he, himself, might not be entirely careful with his guns when he was out shooting (this is the same man who used to go out in the middle of lightning storms and hold his arms to the sky in the hope he would get struck). That it was my effort to have a little say in how Lennon was educated about how to handle guns and maybe his attitudes towards them.
The morning of my birthday, the 29th of August, Lennon tucked his target with the bulls-eye in his backpack and headed off to school - excited to show it to this Daddy that night.
I went off to work where I sat at my desk drafting an email to Shawn letting him know I had taken the kids shooting and hoping he would somehow understand.
Before the email was ever finished the text came in from Amber asking if the kids or I had talked to Shawn last night.
It turns out that the very afternoon the kids were learning to shoot a gun their father drove into the mountains, not too far from where we were, wrote an angry suicide note and, sometime in the early morning hours of the next day, he shot himself in the right temple.
That night while I waited the endless hours to tell the kids that their father was gone I went and took the target out of Lennon's backpack and tucked it away.
No one in the family has ever spoken about going shooting that day. No one has ever talked about going again.
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