Timing is everything.

My mother-in-law (the mother of my ex-husband) was born Mormon, but when the time was right for her (after her son married me and when she decided she wanted to), she converted to Judaism. Awesome. She’s amazing. She’s wicked smart, and having her in my life is one of the greatest things to happen to me in my existence.

I love her sense of timing. She became a Jew when the timing worked and we love it.

This past weekend my sons and I visited her in Northern California without the ex. (We do stuff like that in our divorce; visiting each other’s family even if the other isn’t with us. Unusual? Yes. Great for the kids? Totally. Good for me too? Yes, because she’s awesome.)

Safta (as they call her) brought each of them a new toy to play with, as she does every time we visit. This time, the timing stung. She knew it; I knew it. We looked at each other and sighed. We forged ahead anyway.

On the heels of the murder of two black men that sparked protests all over the country, and on the heels of the murder of seven Dallas police officers, she gave them Nerf guns. Guns. Now. Guns.

Oh, how excited my boys were! I don’t have any kind of guns in my house; real or ‘play.’ Their dad has a few, but it’s just not a mainstay of their playtime. Guns.

These guns were small and they had three red foam bullets. My boys spent a good deal of each morning and evening at their grandma’s lining up figurines on her mantle and shooting them down. They even got my pacifist, super-gentle uncle involved when he came for the day from San Francisco. The man doesn’t own a cell phone he’s so bohemian; but here he was shooting foam bullets at figurines.

I swallowed hard as I saw them shooting. It hurts to think of the children their age who have had fatal access to guns and still do. For the sake of clarity , I support the right to bear arms and know that there are many people who own and keeps guns responsibly. I don’t want this to be seen as an anti gun post; it’s more about the timing of it all on the heels of weeks of national discussions about the use of guns and the reality that guns have killed many innocent people in ways that have been brought to the public consciousness very recently.

It hurts to know the things their grandma and my uncle and I know: guns took the lives of so many innocent people that week, and every week, and every day.

It also warmed my heart to know how innocent they still get to be. A play gun is not a weapon of killing for them; it is a tool for knocking down little figurines of pretend men. It is practice at aiming and precision. It feels good to connect with something that way; I’ve felt it when I’ve knocked down a tower of blocks at a carnival and, yes,when I have shot targets and bottles in safe controlled environments where people learn to shoot guns. I get it.

And they don’t have to get it yet. They can enjoy the feeling of aiming and firing without it meaning death and sacrifice and anguish and protest and anger and rage and destruction and grief.

One day they’ll know. But not yet.

It’s all about the timing. Timing is everything.