by Kelli Ford

Disclaimer: Just because I missed Mothers Day does not mean I am taking this opportunity to re-win my best-daughter-in-the-world points....Honest.

It's a pleasant mid-May Austin day outside. I stand in cool, gray drizzles with the backpack I grabbed in the rushed moments after someone ran past my room shouting a red-faced, "Evacuate the building! It's real!" The parking lot (can this be far enough away?) adjacent to the old American Institute for Learning, a charter school downtown, is filled with clusters of high school students joking and asking questions of worried staff. The muffled rumor is a bomb threat -- just some kids with summer-time, hump-day fever wanting to go to the lake and drink some beer...surely. But the serious looks on some faces, the biting of bottom lips, and my own paranoid, racy heart tell another tale. Teen angst has a new and dangerous intensity these days. What if this is real?

I search the crowd for suspicious looking characters. You know, black-coated, acne-faced students who don't quite look like everyone else. Wait a minute; this is a charter school. No one here quite looks like everyone else! Oh God. I walk slowly away from the crowd. This is all just a bluff anyway. Oh, I wish I didn't work at a school.

What twisted thought. Schools should be havens for those children who have no other. Fear should only be associated with some punk bully and lunch money battles. Now, schools have become scary. My mind tells me shootings in schools are still isolated and random incidents, but my eyes dart around every few seconds....just to check. Isolated and random or not, even one such incident is pure insanity. Anyone who might find that statement overly dogmatic has already become too desensitized to feel whatever it is to which some of our children's actions are pointing.

My thoughts turn to my Mom as the "boys in blue" pull up. (A new respect for them -- at least the bomb squad -- grows as I see them enter a building I want to get as far away from as possible.) I don't know why I never had the urge to run through my high school Terminator-style mowing down those in my path. Granted, I grew up in slightly different times. I didn't have a computer in every room in my home. Okay, I didn't have a computer in any room in my house. (This is not a "technology is evil and it is killing our world" piece, don't worry.) I had a wonderful mom. (I had a pretty great dad too, but I haven't missed Father's Day yet.) She worked always to make sure we had what we did. She is my best friend, still. We fought. We cried. I got my butt beat with a belt when I went way out of line, so I rarely went way out of line. Simple. My mom was gone a lot because she had to work so much, but she always left me a note telling me something like this: "Be in by 8pm. We'll eat at Dairy Queen tonight. Please get the clothes out of the dryer and fold them. I love you more than anything in the world. Mom."

Before anything, I knew I was loved -- Dairy Queen three nights a week or not! I didn't have the Anarchist Cookbook or "Doom" beckoning me from my bedroom. If I had, I don't know how things would have been different. Something tells me maybe I would be a little less sensitive to violence, but in the end, the commanding image of Mom would have won over any bouts I might have with "should I or shouldn't I.'"

All uneasiness seems to be gone from almost all of the staff and students alike as we wander away into downtown Austin. The threat is just a hoax, but just to be sure, we'll go home for the day. I feel a little silly for being so scared, but I can nurse my psycholgical wounds from the comfort of home. And for the students lucky enough to have a ride, it looks like this hump-day will be spent at the lake after all.