It started just before the pandemic. Maybe even before that, if I’m honest. My father died unexpectedly in 2016, we were in the middle of planning a move abroad for work, something temporary, something exciting. His death paused everything. My grief was heavy, and our kids were still so little. Jobs felt uncertain for many reasons. We needed steadiness, so we stayed. We planted hard in Austin.

For a while, it felt like we were doing the right thing: leaning into community, building a home, finding our rhythm again. But something in me was already unravelling. In 2016 when Texas passed open carry, I honestly couldn’t believe it. I grew up not unfamiliar with guns, but there was a sense that guns were tools when I was a child. It was starting to feel like they were accessories.

In 2021, permitless carry passed. This feeling of discomfort, walking into grocery stores and spotting handguns. Sure there were signs, but if you didn’t know what concealed carry looked like you would have never known. Why do you need a gun at the grocery store. The beef has already been slaughtered. And hopefully humanely.

No American is a stranger to mass shootings, but they just kept getting closer: Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe, El Paso. Uvalde broke something in me. That school. Those babies. It should have all changed with Columbine in 1999, or in 2012 with Sandy Hook, but for sure our elected officials would finally agree that enough children had died. They didn’t.

We had lived in our little south Austin neighbourhood for 14 years. We knew Canada was the destination ahead and had moved from our sweet neighbourhood the year before. But all this killing, it go personal. One of our neighbours’ sons killed a police officer, two of his family members, and two others were seriously injured. His son died as well. The weight of that violence settled on the street like dust. The father, who I’d worked with on our neighbourhood HOA committee for years, he happened to be out of town that weekend. I couldn’t imagine. I found out because I had people in the neighbourhood, who didn’t know we had moved, text to ask if I knew what was happening in the middle of the night.

Then, while packing to move from the rented house to temporary housing before we left for Canada, I had to explain to our kids why so many police cars were flying down Mopac. Why they heard gunshots near where they sleep. A gunman had gone on a spree and was hiding in the dry creek behind our home. He had already killed six people and injured others. What they heard were the final shots as police closed in. How do you tell your children that? How do you parent in that atmosphere and pretend it’s just another Tuesday?

It wasn’t just fear, it was the feeling that this wasn’t avoidable anymore. That no neighbourhood was far enough away, no plan solid enough. I felt I had no ability to protect them in a place so unwilling to change. So unwilling to see that mental health is an issue and that easy access to guns was not helping anyone.

We loved that city. Austin gave us so much. But it also kept asking us to adapt to things that never should have been normal. Guns in Target. Lock down drills in kindergarten. Neighbours lost to violence. That undercurrent of “this is just how things are” began to feel like a warning instead of a comfort.

There’s more to say, about healthcare, about parenting, about the things we realized we couldn’t ask our children to grow up believing were unchangeable. But that’s for another post.

For now, this is where the feeling began. Not with one moment, but with so many. A slow, steady knowing that staying meant shrinking. That arguments felt muted because, was the other person carrying a gun?