I Love You. . . Get home safe.

Lorraine - A widow, a Doberman, and a handgun in her lap.

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

---

These are the things that kill my kids.

Lorraine feels the heavy weight of the handgun resting in her open palm on her lap. The cold metal of the barrel, the roughness of the patterned grip, and smooth curve of the trigger. She tried to curl her fingers around it, but they refused. Like so many times since her husband had died, her body betrayed her, acting more from emotions and hormones than from directives and demands.

“We’re just going to sit here. We don’t even have to go to the range,” Allen said to her as she felt the rigidness of the gun grip on her palm.

These are the things that kill my kids.
Gun violence is the number one cause of death for children in this country.
How am I even considering getting a gun?

She couldn’t see him, or the gun, or even her own hands with any clarity. Everything for the last few months had been distorted by the watery vision of salty tears floating just below the surface of her lower eyelids. Widowhood had gifted her a year of firsts, but holding a handgun wasn’t one of the firsts she ever imagined.

But when ICE agents shot a man at 24th and Lyndale, in her neighborhood, just a couple blocks from her home, nothing felt safe anymore. She drove through that intersection every night on the way home from the dog park. The clouds of smoke from the tear-gas and flashbangs reached her home, four blocks away, and hovered for four days.

Nothing felt safe anymore.

She’d texted Allen that night, as the altercation with ICE and the neighborhood rapid response teams continued.

I think it’s time to go to the gun range.

Allen understood Lorraine’s relationship to gun violence. He’d also been one of those super-friends who had been with her since her husband died. She knew he’d be tender with her, and firm. He was safe.

The gun in her open-palm on her lap was not.

They did eventually make it to the gun range, but she couldn’t get herself to enjoy anything about it. The whole scene, even with Allen’s steady support, just felt unsafe. Her legs felt numb, and her fingers tingly, and her vision cloudy, and her brain foggy. Just like the first weeks of COVID. And just like when George Floyd was killed. And just like when Renee Good died. The sensation of unsafe had become way too familiar.

“Do you want me to go with you to look at getting a gun for yourself?” Allen asked as they walked out of the gun range.

“Hell no, I got a Doberman. That’s more responsible.”

“That’s fair.”

Poppy, fifty pounds of sleek black Doberman wiggles, greeted her when she got home from the range. She’d gotten Poppy in October, because every widow needs something warm that breathes in the house. And, with all the wobbles of feeling unsafe in recent years, Lorraine wanted a dog that commanded a sense of safety just by their physical appearance.

Poppy provided more than a sense of security, she was a breathing compost bin that transformed all Lorraine’s sadnesses into joys with just a few slobbery kisses. Poppy absorbed every wave of Lorraine’s grief that she could, sleeping against her back at night, following her from room to room, pressing her lanky paw into Lorraine’s leg when the crying started, as if she could hold the broken pieces together by applying pressure.

My little grief dog.

Lorraine is a 43 year-old queer woman teaching in an urban high school where she is often the only white person in the room. As the advisor for the gay-straight alliance her classroom is the safe space for a very specific population of students.

Lorraine knows what unsafe feels like, so she does everything she can to provide a sense of safe to her kids.

“I love you, I am proud of you. Get home safe.” is how she sends her students off at the end of every class.

“I got home safe, Poppy.”

Lorraine pats Poppy’s head as she sits down at the kitchen table. Poppy puts her paw on Lorraine’s thigh, the same place where the gun had rested a few hours earlier.

And Lorraine gets a flash of déjà vu. She was sitting in the exact same chair, wearing the exact same outfit, with Poppy’s paw on her thigh just like this when she picked up her phone a few weeks earlier to call her boys’ school, the day Renee Good was killed.

She stares at her phone on the table, feeling all the same feelings she felt that day.

She was still off work recovering from a hysterectomy. Coming down from a ketamine trip at a mental health clinic, Lorraine was still a bit loopy when the nurse said, “I hope you get home safe.” That wasn’t how the nurse usually sent her off.

“Safe?” was the only word Lorraine could squeak out.

“Haven’t you heard the news?”

A half hour later, Lorraine sat at her kitchen table, Poppy’s paw pressing into her thigh, talking to the receptionist at her boys’ school.

“Please be gentle,” she had said to the receptionist on the other end of the phone. “The last time they got a call that mom was coming to pick them up in the middle of the day . . . was when their dad died.”

“I remember.”

“Just let them know I need them. Like, I just want to make sure they get home safely tonight because I don’t know what’s going to happen because I know the people of Minneapolis and we’re not going to take this.”

“I agree.”

An hour later, both boys were home, safe.

Then, in the middle of the afternoon, a news alert buzzed on her phone, and all three of them started getting texts from friends. ICE agents had clashed with students and teachers at Roosevelt High School during dismissal.

During dismissal.

The moment of the school day when teachers stand at the door doing exactly what Lorraine does — looking each kid in the eye and releasing them into the world with whatever words they use to say get home safe.

Come to the kitchen, please.

Lorraine texted her boys who were in their separate happy-places in the house. Then, she set her phone face-down on the kitchen table and sat in that same chair for the third time that day. Poppy bounced over and put her paw in that same spot on her thigh once again. The pressure of her paw was warm and soothing.

My people are home safe.

She reminded herself as the boys trudged into the kitchen.

As a family, they drew up a safety plan — what to do if. . . which routes to take, how to communicate, where to go as a backup home, who their backup people are. When they were done, the boys pushed back from the table. Poppy followed them out of the kitchen, her nails clicking against the floor.

Lorraine sat alone at the table, her palm open on her thigh, where a gun had once rested. The place where Poppy’s paw had pressed. The place where her phone had been when the receptionist said I remember.

She could hear her boys settling into the tv room, the familiar sounds of home — a can of pop opening, the TV turning on, Poppy’s tags jingling.

My people are home safe.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜