Thirty More Seconds

Mothering in America

Author’s Note: I address issues of gun violence in this reflection. Please proceed with care.

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Snuggle time.

He’s 11, but he still likes to snuggle.

It’s the night before the first day of middle school.

I’m doing that thing I do on milestone nights like this. Trying to take him in. Trying to be present. Getting all sentimental in my head. Calling him “my babyyyy” and faux crying on him.

So, we snuggle. And I’m happy for him. He’s ready.

“When you wake up tomorrow, you’ll be a sixth grader,” I say just because I feel the need to say something other than goodnight.

Then, “Goodnight. I love you,” I say, and give him a tender kiss on his cheek. He knows this means I’m about to leave and immediately moves into bargaining mode.

He asks for thirty more seconds (as he often does).

I throw my arm back over him.

A minute or so passes. Then. Kiss.

“Just thirty more seconds,” he says again.

Like muscle memory, an initial feeling of frustration dances at the corners of my brain but immediately subsides.

How many times I say “yes” to the “thirty more seconds, please” or the “no, mama, just two more minutes” requests typically depends on the night. Sometimes I’m really present with the power of motherhood and the sacredness of the moment we’re sharing.

But other times it’s contingent on work I have to get done, or if there’s a new episode of The Gilded Age, or how tired I am, or if my patience has already run thin.

But not tonight.

Tonight, he could ask me for thirty more seconds and thirty more seconds and thirty more seconds until sunrise.

Tonight, I make the decision to say “yes” every time.

With this decision, and with this presence, my mind instinctively drifts to mothers in Gaza, as it does periodically, and the familiar—but not familiar enough—ache rises from my chest to my throat, and I feel my skin get hot with a deep sadness that leads to maddening anger that leads to shame.

I lay my hand on his belly, feeling its rise and fall.

I squeeze my eyes shut to prevent any possible tears from coming.

Am I disembodied enough today that they won’t?

Like a well-rehearsed play, my mind shifts scenes. Now I see that one picture making its rounds across the internet of the mother running barefoot after hearing of the shooting in Minneapolis. Running. To her baby.

I squeeze my eyes shut tighter, but the truth is still there no matter how tightly I squeeze.

It’s 2025, and my child practices shelter-in-place, lockdown and evacuation drills at home. At first, I thought he was simply imitating what they did at school, a sort of (grim) “play pretend” game. But one day when his dad and I didn’t come down fast enough after he blew his whistle for an evacuation, he got genuinely upset. “You guys have to take this seriously. What if it were real?” he asked, earnestly.

This same child said, casually, “This could be where a shooting happens,” when we pulled up to the beautiful, open park next to his new school. Like you might say, “This would be a cool place to hang out,” or “Is there anyone on the pickleball court right now?”

This is their normal.

Mothers here, in America, used to cry at the start of a new school year because it meant their children were growing up; now we cry out of fear that they won’t.

Mothers here, in America, are aching for mothers everywhere.

Mothers here.

“Goodnight,” he says quietly, after my third kiss. I’m free to go.

I stay just another thirty seconds longer.

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I’ve written a few other short pieces over the years about mothering in the wake of gun violence in America. Here’s one I wrote about Uvalde, TX in 2022 and one about why I joined a national movement to ban guns in 2023 and another one about why I was flying to Denver to support the banning of guns in 2023, and it would be really f*cking great if none of us had to write about any of this in 2026.