The Night I Fell Apart

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a woman was filmed walking in waist high water, holding a small child.  With all the shocking images that flooded the media, this relatively mundane image is the one that got to me.  It’s the one I still can’t stop seeing. At the time, Michaela was less than a year and Samantha was a little over 3 years old and there was just something very real to me about the struggle that woman must be going through.

She survived the initial tragedy.  She kept herself and that child alive and she made it.  But for her, it wasn’t over.  Who knew how long she would have to walk to get to a place she could rest and put the baby down?  How long could she trust her body to keep them safe?  How long until the andrenaline rush wore off and she succumbed to shock?  How long until her arms faltered and the baby slipped into the water, even for a moment?  How awful for her.  She was exhausted.  You could just tell by looking at her.

A thought then occurred to me.  She was just lucky she only had one child to carry.  What if she’d had two?  As soon as I thought it, I realized how ridiculous that was.  I had no idea if she had just the one baby or if she had more.  I had no idea if she’d had another child and lost that child in the flooding. 

That one image and that single thought became the source of my deepest darkest fear.  How could I carry both my children to safety if I had to evacuate?  How could I reasonably keep my babies safe.

Three months later I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of the tornado siren.  Still primed from nightly feedings, I was up instantly and quickly standing in the girls’ bedroom.  The siren was screaming and I was standing in their room between their two beds, frozen.  I couldn’t physically carry both of them and I knew it.  I couldn’t stomach the idea of carrying one at a time because the thought of leaving one.. choosing one first… made me physically ill.

So I did the next most logical thing.  I ran back into the bedroom and started yelling for Mike to help me.  Between the siren and me screaming, you would think he would wake up.  Not even a little bit.  So the next most logical thing for me to do was to dismantle my jewelry box, drawer by drawer and start chucking them at his head, screaming at him to get out of that bed.  He woke up then,  yelling back at me, furious, but awake and then up helping me carry them downstairs

As we sat in the basement waiting for the sirens to quiet, Mike tried to figure out what was at the root of my sudden intense fury.   The longer we stayed in the scary unfinished basement trying to calm the girls, the more upset I got.     

Fear.  Always fear.  It’s the one thing that makes me lose my cool.  We talked about the fact that we would likely never face that kind of flooding or any real effects of a hurricane.  We talked about the fact that you can’t prepare for every unlikely scenario.  We even talked about the fact that I likely wouldn’t be alone in most emergency scenarios.

In the end we decided that I would sleep better if we moved the child size life jackets into the upstairs closet.   Because somehow in my mind, that made all the difference in the world.  It wasn’t rational, but it wasn’t so irrational that it impeded on our daily life.  It was a little crazy but it was the kind of crazy we could live with.

So, two life jackets and an emergency backpack filled with water and granola bars took up residence in the upstairs closet.  And I was able to put it to rest.  Funny how fear works.  We don’t need to be rational to be afraid and we don’t need rational  solutions to curb that fear.  We just need to believe.  Somehow that’s enough.