Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Tuesdays are the pits

Yesterday I found myself emotionally frazzled.  I couldn't mentally organize myself, kept snapping at the kids, and eventually ended up making excuses to sneak off and cry secretly in the bathroom, in the car, in the laundry room...

At the end of the day I was praying, asking God to show me what was wrong with me.  I don't like living in such a fragile place.  I am a tough chick; I DON'T sneak off to cry.  That's just not me.

I was complaining to God about how much running around I had to do on Tuesdays--take Ian to his special needs preschool at 8:30am, take Bear and Caleb to their church preschool at 9am, go work out at a local park (I run a trail with Ellie in the jogger while Prewitt and Maggie play in sight of me the whole time), pick up the younger 2 boys at 1pm, run errands across town, get Maggie to art class at 3:45pm and then pick her up at 5:15pm and take Prewitt to wrestling practice at 6pm.  Sigh, Tuesday is crazy at our house.  Then I realized that every one of those events required a trip into the tornado zone.  I drive through the desolate, broken, trauma-ridden landscape of the tornado path up to 8 or 9 times on Tuesdays.

I noticed last week when I drove a "new" way through the tornado path that my hands were moist, I was scratching my fingernails against my leg, and my breathing was rapid and uneasy.  There was destruction I had not seen and my mind reeled to process it all.  Every wounded skeleton of a home, every partially standing building, every tree missing its bark and most of its limbs, every bent street sign, every bit of random debris in the trees (jackets, insulation, sheets, metal from garage doors, etc.) was a story of fear, of trauma, maybe of death.

Sometimes, when driving through the destruction zone I get flashes of that night.  The odd, disconcerting mix of hail falling on me while lightening flashed without pause...the look on Maggie's face as she screamed she was dying and seeing her body trapped and twisted and thinking she was going to die...yelling to Chuck and him not responding (he blacked out for part of the storm) and thinking I had to save all the kids on my own...Maggie's face again...

So, yeah. Tuesdays are the pits.

1 comment:

  1. Oh Melody, I'm sorry that it is so hard, especially on Tuesday. This reminds me to continue to pray for you and your family. Sheri Plowman

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