A mother of a student from Saugus High took to social media Saturday to share her thoughts and experiences after Thursday’s shooting at Saugus High.

Ed. Note: The following is a letter posted by Micaela Bensko, mother of a 14-year-old student at Saugus High School. It has been posted with her permission.

A Mother’s Perspective on November 14 and the Solution No one Wants to See

I cannot even begin to express how much your messages mean. I’ve laid in bed at night going through each and every one and taking this time to soak in how blessed our family is. So many loved ones, and friends I’ve held in my heart for years, but distance, life and time have kept us all apart. One thing it has reminded me of, is how one person who has touched your life at one moment in time, can touch it again as though no time has passed. A simple note that your heart is with us and these families, has more weight than I could have ever imagined at a time like this. It is not a cliché. It is the oxygen we need when ours is stolen. These words are heavy because they carry in them every word we cannot find to express what no one should feel.

Watching our child process the impossible is like being lost at sea. The helplessness is overwhelming. Just the day before the shooting, Emma, 14, had a dr. appt. Having had the struggles of many young teens finding their way, academically and emotionally, had transferred to Saugus from her other HS just after the start of the school year. She was radiant explaining to her doctor how she had finally found a place she felt supported and accepted by students and teachers. She loved her counseling mentors who were making such a difference in her daily life at school. The front office had quickly became an extended family with everyone embracing Em as they do for their students.

To see her and her close friends, one whom she hid with for hours in the office by the quad, hearing everything, are trying to partake in well meant festivities. Fundraising for therapeutic services she herself will benefit from, but needing to leave early due to the anxiety and devastation it brings back. What do we do as parents who are supposed to have the answers, and make things better or at least offer the Illusion that they are?

There is no blueprint for parenting, but nor is there one for tragedy.

We feel split in two as protectors who failed and victims trying so hard to defy the stigma by taking action. But against or for what, exactly?

The helicopters were still hovering above our homes yet politicians in real time knew exactly what we needed done. Yet we live in the midst of this, know every twist and turn of events as though we lived them ourselves, because we did, yet answers elude us.

Is it gun control? Is it creating “prisons” out of schools? Or does it lay somewhere in-between.

Our child was in the bathroom with her best friend, which they exited to the quad with backpacks and papers strewn everywhere. Evidently it was the echo of their banter while creating a silly video, combined with flushing toilets which blocked the 16 seconds of gunfire just outside. They exited to the quad, their usual morning table under the blue awnings was vacant with voices screaming to hide. Something was wrong but they didn’t know what. They ran from room to room only to find windows dark and doors without locks, barricaded or locked. Finally, someone from in the office facing the quad, saw her and pulled them in.

The next moments she texted were of screaming policemen and adults just outside, sirens and more sirens.

At 7:46 am we received a text.

“Mama I’m having a panic attack and I’m really scared, they said they heard gunshots, then it happened me and Emilee were in the bathrooms and we walked out and there was everyone’s backpacks were on the ground and the teachers were yelling at us to find a classroom and they were all locked so we had to run from the bathrooms we were at to the office and now we’re sitting in a dark room in the office with a group of other students and some teachers, I keep hearing people/ teachers & officers I believe, yelling and screaming at each other and panicking and every time anyone yells and every time someone moves the door handle I feel like crying, just now I heard someone from outside yelling code red”

No child should ever have to think nonetheless write these words. Our children will now live them them the rest of their lives.

Monday morning quarterbacking can be productive. But what is it seems as though it is every Monday.

How can truly effective changes occur when these tragedies continue to morph into soundbites, events rolling into one another, losing traction with each event which fractures our children’s childhood and their lives?

Practical changes are possible. Too many are scared that if we put metal detectors at school entrances, “they” win.

Are our children’s lives worth this gamble of acting “as if”?

Some don’t want our youth to grow up afraid of going to school and creating too much visible security will effect the psychologically.

The days for these concerns of what it will look like if we show the visibility of living fear are over. Our children live in fear every day of their lives now.

This was the second real life lockdown our daughter Cassidy, a local leader of the March for our Lives movement attending Valencia High School, has gone through this fall. Only this time, it was her little sister’s life which hung in the balance.

What good is a school without metal detectors if every day is a game of Russian roulette. Literally, our daughter was within seconds of being in that quad. Yes, I’m making this about us, because it is about us. It’s about US as a community comprised of moms and dads who came to Santa Clarita as the “safest city per capita of any city in the United States.” That was then, this is now.

Nowhere is safe anymore and this is fact. This is a truth beyond any partisan line. This is about more than guns. This is about having a practical solution in the palm of our hands too many are afraid to soil.

Sure, there is a list of things we can do. The predominant being home schooling. But is this what we want? I don’t even know. But I do know there is no cost higher than that of losing a child.

The open gated entrance to the school sits the length of the administrative office away from where our children’s lives and innocence were stolen on November 14th.

The common denominator in each of these shootings is that the perpetrators came from within. It is not about keeping them out. They already breathe the air our children do, sit next to them in class and run track on their field.

This is about keeping weapons out.

Will we ever be able to protect our children from everything? No. But we know this.

Our children wear helmets, we don’t take away their skateboards, we make them wear helmets. We make them wear seatbelts we don’t take away their cars. Yet our children are dying in what should be the safest place on earth at this time of their life, and respond with closed or monitored gates, enclosing them with the very thing we could so easily protect them from, at least in there. In their school. In the one place we as parents are not allowed to go without a sticker on our chest.

To those who believe there is no answer, that it could happen outside the gates and there is nothing we can do, I respectfully and lovingly disagree. If we can do something to at least create the interior of our schools to be safer, so our children have that one mechanism they know will prevent guns from entering that space, it would be AN answer. No, there is no sure-fire preventative. But this can at least be a tool to allow them to add numbers, and not the dead, attend proms, and not funerals, and to hopefully become the adults who might ultimately have the answers eluding us today.

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