How to Be a Person When Summer Hurts

Dear Adam Levine,

You have no idea. This summer really, truly has hurt like a mother. And not in that way your song seems to describe, a la I-can’t-get-this-girl-off-my-mind. More like, this summer has introduced to my body a new affliction: hashtag indigestion.

I remember exactly where I was when I read about Charleston. I was getting ready to go to bed, having readied my home and our fourth bedroom for my parents-in-law, whom my husband had just that evening picked up at the airport for their week-long stay with us.

I scrolled my Twitter feed – I follow a handful of people who are vocal on Black Twitter – and began to see snippets of information that alarmed me. I remember saying to Andrew, “Something’s happened.” And I kept scrolling until I could find a cohesive story about the shooting, the victims, the alleged shooter still at large. My prayers that evening were for the victims’ families, the shooter’s quick apprehension, and that he’d have no opportunities to inflict further harm, take more lives.

And when I woke the next morning, stomach knotted, I checked Twitter and Facebook, confident that he must have been found while I slept. In fact, that confidence was the only reason I had been able to allow myself to fall asleep in the first place. And while this man was found and taken into custody that same day, I have to say it felt like the Longest Day to me.

And then there was more. Every news story that followed seemed centered around the families’ forgiveness rather than the video I saw on Twitter which showed people who were rightly rallying and calling for justice, or rebranding the racially motivated hate crime to which Roof himself admitted as an attack on the Church, or humanizing the killer by highlighting that he “almost didn’t do it.”

I was shaken. Angry. Tired. Sick to my stomach. Sad in my heart. Mourning these people I’d never met, for the tragedy of their lives cut short so violently, solely based on their race, which is the same as mine. And terrified of the public response to focus on forgiveness, move on, and ignore the racism so entrenched in this country that it produced Dylan Roof: not an anomaly but a proof of concept.

I mean, for real, Adam Levine. When this summer started, I thought for sure I’d found a summer anthem in Maroon Five’s single. It had a good beat, didn’t seem (at first, wasn't listening closely enough:fail) too obviously to reduce women to objects, and didn’t contain any discernible profanity – though it’s obviously hinted at in the title. This seemed like a win to me.

And then Charleston. And all I could do was pray and cry and try not to be sick to my stomach. And try to look forward and trust God but still look around me and see a country much harsher than the one I thought I was raising my children in. So my anthem became Tamela Mann’s “Take Me to the King,” as I showed up to church every Sunday wearing black, because I can’t stop thinking about these lives cut short, sorting through complicated grief even in the midst of faith, because I can’t say enough that #blacklivesmatter, even though so many people in this country are so determined not to hear it.

Indeed, this summer has hurt like a mother. I pray there’s never another like it.