This photo is me as a little girl in my one-woman show, learning how to shoot a gun for the first time.
Terrified and yet-I thought it was cool because in Brooklyn-it was considered cool by a lot of the people I knew.
And my dad was so happy and approved.
It wasn’t until my mother was shot and killed by my father with that gun that I realized the magnitude of his poor parenting skills and that a gun was not a toy to be played with.
Could I have learned the lesson sooner and somehow changed things?
That was a question I asked myself a thousand times during the first few years before I started healing.
Funny thing—about four years before my mom died I was in a play reading called Toy Gun about that very thing–that guns aren’t toys.
Next up—I’ll be bringing selected scenes from my show to three high school classes and doing a mini-workshop on how to forgive for the students and performing in V-Day. V-Day raises money, primarily through performances of The Vagina Monologues, to raise awareness and stop violence against women and girls around the world.
In 2006 I had the opportunity to bring my one-woman show to an event in New York City , also founded by Eve Ensler, called Until the Violence Stops: NYC. In 2007 I performed my one-woman show again in New York-this time in Brooklyn at the opening of a cultural center in the main library-the same one my mother had taken me to on numerous occasions. The invitation to perform that show came out of performing in Vienna. The photo above is from one of the performances in Austria.
How can you turn your grief into a blessing today? What is one small step you can take?
Forgive and Be Free,
Brenda
