Breathing echoes like a heartbeat in my ears. It is mine. And it is deafening.
Grass, cool and clumped from the mower, is sticking to my heals. I look right, left, my blinking as dramatic as a secret. The drum of my pulse beats heavy when I see my opponents, but deep inside I hear the driving build of Eminem’s Lose Yourself, and I do.

“Hut,” I say with a pause. “Hibbity-hut. Hike!”

Suddenly the only music I hear is “The Circus Song”. My hands release the football to my oldest daughter. It bounces off her fingers and boinks her nose while our third teammate is doing running somersaults and headstands. This, I do not think, is the best plan of attack, nor anything we discussed in our huddle. Alas, I charge at Chase with bear-hug aggression. He is quick, faster than me in his distracting neon shirt but I stay focused. However, I am too late. It is finished. And in our bloody fight we have lost the play.

“The plan was that I would kiss you,” I tell him.

“Oh I thought, Wow she’s really upping her defense and getting in my face.”
He bobs his head the way that’s made me laugh for 14 years. Still out of breath, I bend with laughter.

Our son is recapping every move, his oversized Manning jersey hanging loose around his arms while his words whistle through the gap in his teeth. “I was like, rauogh!” He twists with a funny face so his sister will laugh. She’s too busy twirling.

“One more and then it’s bath time,” I say.
“Noooo!” They howl not because we are almost going inside, but because they hate to smell good. Apparently.

The sky grabs me, its pinks and oranges mimicking all the beauty I feel in this fenced yard. Overwhelming. Alive. Fulfilled. Fiercely in love.

The girls are ready. I have them both agree to take a break from cartwheels long enough to beat the boys. I hush my voice to block out the enemy.

“All right, I’ll pass it to you and then you hand it to her. Help me guard them.”
They nod, smiling at my seriousness. I pretend they are really in it with me, that we flex our girly muscles and shout, Break!

“Hut. Hibbity-hut. Hike!”

I toss. She hands it off. Little one has the ball and is making a run for it. My best efforts to man-handle my husband are seemingly working now that he knows he might get a smooch out of all this chaos. Wait, there’s…there’s crying. Who’s crying?

“Ohh, sweetheart,” he says. Not to me. He rushes to her as she wails.
“What happened?” I ask.
“He tagged her but kinda pushed.”
“I see. Not ready for football?”

I scoop her into giggles. “Baths!”
“Uuuuugh.”

Oh yes. If not for you then for me.

We gather sandals rubbed thin from long days and dusty camping trips. Put away camo and Tinker Bell chairs alike. Our garage door descends with the sun and I hear squeals upstairs.

“Start the water!” I yell. As in, quit racing around naked.

It’s when I start stacking clean plates, drips sneaking to my wrists from the dishwasher, that I say, “This was the best night of my summer.”
“Mine too.”

“If I have to do one more thing by myself up there I’m going to turn into a really ugly parent,” I tell him in a voice that is not mine.
“What are you doing?”
“Everything.”
“Then don’t do it.”
“They won’t let me not do it.”

“Mom,” says a monster from upstairs. It is innocently sweet but enters my ears like a constant, sour dripping.

“Just stay down here, I’ll take care of them,” he says. “Kids, if you need anything, ask Dad.”

“Mom,” the little one says again. 

In my haste to relax, Pinterest is checked, I deflect every request, they writhe on the floor because they must, and I have the school bells all but timed to the millisecond. One. More. Day. 

Finally as my mom-joints ache with the last goodnight and I grab my pile of books that promise to calm, images far more real than uncomfortable disturb me. I don’t want to see them, yet what am I saying if I turn away? 

A pink bow under her dirty chin wasn’t enough to erase the atrocity of the gun barrel lying just beside her lips. Her head was tilted back in submission and so I wonder if her terrified mother reached instinctively in that moment to keep her neck supported, the way we moms do a hundred times a day when they are new. Do the memories come, of the wobbly sway of her daughter just born, those momentous steps when she learned to walk, how she mimicked a clap? Do the memories come only to end in this, a horrendous execution?

Boys, gathered together like they’re taking a midday nap, dust in the creases of their clothes- only they will never get up. Women, stripped, shamed, and God knows what else before they are bled out as an example to all who will be forced to choose. A father, holding his daughter up under the arms when she has no face.

I yelled at my children today. I texted to a friend: “I’m burned out from the craziness of summer. School starts this week…yippie!” There were minutes I didn’t want to be a mom, and my kids probably wished the same. How can every store be out of protractors, I say in a huff. A doctor’s signature here, breaking up sibling rivalry there, and then it all climaxes to, “You- on that bed, You- over there, and You- had better not say another nasty thing.”

While on the other side of the world a man would do anything to hear one more sassy remark from his child.

I pull myself out of the media hype for a minute, float above the frenzy like I’m in a good dream. This isn’t new. The cruelty of humankind has been happening for centuries. Brothers murdering, women being sacrificed, Jews hated, black men ostracized, babies dismembered and labeled “a choice.” I feel myself getting caught between overwhelming outrage, and complacency over a political issue that has taken out every scrap of the value of life and sectioned it into two parties. I cry out, “God, what are you doing? How can this be?”

Guilt seems useless. Sadness overwhelms. Anger accompanies helplessness. And then it comes to me.

A bedtime story, or two, wrapped in feet that run sidewalks ragged. Extra hugs and lots of wonderings. Their smell of sun and sweat and naiveté. Forgotten piles of dishes, ignored clutter in the hall and a “yes” to what’s in front of me. I open to what’s good, what’s here, what’s difficult that now seems to pale in the glow of foreign bloodshed. More “I love you’s” and longer lingering. Kneeling without names but only faces in a swell of compassion. A plea, a petition to the One who can save us all even as I struggle to understand the story He’s writing.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. 

Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”  -Martin Luther King Jr.   

   Am I still burned out? Yeah. I get to be burned out. (Kids, feel free to still make all requests known to your father. P.S. I will forever and fiercely love you.)