Sane and Reasonable

Katherine Koonce taught parenting seminars often. She loved preparing, researching, and presenting about a myriad of topics, all geared toward helping parents find some steady ground. She was funny and smart and unapologetic in her presentation style, full of knowledge and humility in the acknowledgement that her own elementary parenting days could have gone better. One of her consistent phrases when talking about parenting was to be “sane and reasonable.” To make “sane and reasonable” decisions, to be “sane and reasonable” about our fears and worries, to be “sane and reasonable” when emotions run high (which often meant, be quick to repair, quick to say sorry when situations weren’t handled well).

This phrase was a challenge for me, but something I wanted to aspire to. When my oldest started attending The Covenant School in PreK, I was a hot mess of a mother, triggered left and right by what the demands of motherhood were asking of me. Deep, long lasting relationships were a foreign entity, and yet as a wife and mother I wanted nothing more than to build something stable and grand. I wanted to build relationships that were a home, the kind that could weather and still stand firm. 

Here we are, finding ourselves 11 days out since The Covenant School shooting and I’m longing for anything and everything that resembles sane and reasonable. Love, deep love, has been a gushing water fall all over our family, our friends, our everything. It’s because we have been so covered that I have been able to be present in the immense sea of disbelief. I’m also finding myself with an urgency for appropriate action because I don’t want anyone, anywhere to have to go through what we are going through. People are watching and listening and Tennessee has been in the middle of a storm.

I am a peacemaker. I am a “see it both sides” person. I am a listener. I am a believer in unity for the common good and that ALL things and people can be redeemed. I have bucketloads of grace for the fact that entering touchy conversations will lead to receiving nasty unwarranted comments from people who don’t know me at all. I have this grace because five days after the shooting, my father who had listened to me sob over the phone in all we had experienced, could not help himself and sent a family text about how guns are not the problem; right smack dab in the middle of our fresh grief. Fear and control produce nonsensical actions.

I will not give up believing that we have the bandwidth to make sane and reasonable change. I will not give up believing that humanity can grow and change their minds and be insanely creative together. This is a long game and the more people who are impacted by senseless gun violence (the number is steadily growing each and every day), the more capacity we will build for empathy, healing, and appropriate respectful change. Go to therapy, seek healing in its many forms, look your trauma in the face, rewrite the narratives, do the hard work to bring the biggest amounts of kindness and love to this crazy place. May the news about us, the people of The Covenant School, be a consistent stream of hope, with healthy doses of sane and reasonable action.