In an earthquake, you duck and cover. You find a doorway or a table or a desk, and you wedge yourself beneath, cover your bent head with your arms, and hold on for dear life. If you have small children, you do your best to cover their bodies with your own. If your spouse is nearby, you lock eyes in a stare that communicates all your fear, love, and fear, fear, fear. If you’re the praying type, you pray your guts out that the building you’re occupying will hold firm. But there’s really nothing more you can do. You just hold on and wait as the earth rolls and shakes and shudders and bounces beneath you. When the earthquake is over, and you find out it lasted only 15 seconds, you won’t believe it. It surely seemed like eternity at the time.









When you’re sure the earth has stopped moving, you quickly hug and comfort your crying children. Then you venture from your hiding place to assess the damage, expertly scanning for anything life-threatening. You and your spouse divide and conquer. You notice the goldfish has been sloshed to the floor, and you scramble to scoop it back to safety. Stepping over the books that have fallen from their shelves, you rush to check your water and gas lines in case they need to be turned off. You check the windows, mirrors, and dishes to see if any have broken. When you find some shattered glass, you sweep it up, making sure there are no remaining shards to pierce bare feet.

From the moment the earth began tossing you around like a rag doll until now, you’ve been in survival mode. Now that you know the worst of it is over — and nobody is dead or about to die — you can breathe. But only for a second, because the children are still crying — and you really need to sweep up the cat food that tipped over. You scoop a child or two into your arms, and set to work righting all the pictures, putting the books back on the shelves, and pausing to comfort a child who is trying to be brave, but starting to break down.

In the midst of all this, you come across your grandmother’s tea cup. Or what was once your grandmother’s tea cup. It fell from the shelf and shattered into a hundred pieces. You scoop those pieces up, wipe back tears, and finally sit down to just hold your children close. You all cry together until the baby forgets he was ever sad and crawls off your lap to do some funny thing. Soon, you’re all laughing together — trying to forget the trauma.

You don’t have power that night, so you eat ice cream from the freezer before it melts. You light candles and make a party of your survival. You tuck your little ones into bed, but they begin to cry once they realize they’ll be separated from their parents. So you agree to a family sleepover in the parents’ bed.

As you lie in the extra dark night, made darker by the lack of streetlights, the aftershocks begin. Some are so small your children sleep right through them. Some seem like they might reach the intensity of the first earthquake. There’s loud sobbing from your children, and quiet tears from you, as you pray and just wish this will end.

After finally falling asleep, the morning comes — and the aftershocks have ended. You try to decide if you should live a normal day and send the kids to school, or stay home. It’s unlikely there will be any more earthquakes today, so you decide to get back into the routine. Routine feels good.

Routine feels great for a long time, but you worry if you’re missing something. You painstakingly repair your grandmother’s teacup and wait to feel better. But you don’t. Something is still wrong. Then one day, you’re outside weeding the perimeter of your house, and you notice a crack. In the foundation. Panicking, you consult your spouse, and the two of you decide it’s time to bring in professional help. This can be repaired, they say, but it’s going to be a big process.

When the foundation is cracked on the outside of your home, you see, the damage inside your home is magnified. It’s unsafe. You can ignore the crack, but you will see problems — bigger problems — as you go. Or you can suck it up, admit you’re cracked, and get help.

——–

When I was young, I loved the happily-ever-after stories. After killing the evil queen, escaping the abusive step family, or turning from mermaid to human to mermaid to human, life was good. And celebrated. And smiled about. With talking animals, of course!









Now I wonder just how much emotional baggage those Disney princesses brought into their marriages. And were their princes angry at the beasts they had to fight too?

A crisis is HARD with a capital H. It’s so hard, you can only crisis. You can’t live. You can only hang on, duck and cover, and pray for it to end.

When the earth stops shaking, when the gas line has been checked, and the gasping goldfish returned to its home, you think you’ll feel better. Because life is supposed to be happy at that point. Nobody died! Hooray! But you don’t realize the emotional trauma your sweet children suffered, you don’t realize the resentment you feel about what happened to you, and you don’t realize how bad your fingers hurt from holding on so tight until you get the chance to let go and stretch them out — and then you realize they hurt like hell.

And you learn that your routine was only a band-aid. Now it’s time to fix the foundation. You sensed it all along. And while you’re pretty angry about the cost and the process of repairing that crack, you’re also pretty relieved there’s a chance for restoration.









October is Depression Awareness Month. People have no problem talking about arthritis, birth control, or knee surgery, but depression still seems to be something you only talk about when you’re talking about someone else.

Well, I’ll be your someone else. Depression comes to many people for many different reasons. For me? It’s lurking about because I went through a traumatic time. For me, depression is like the aftermath of an earthquake.

I’m really blessed to have many people in my life who listen to me and care about me. I’m really blessed that I haven’t received any judgment — only support. I’m on a healing path, and that’s why I write this now. I don’t write this to hear condolences or encouragement; I’m past that point. I write to tell you it has been hard. I write to tell you depression found me even though I was doing everything “right.”

And if it’s found you, you aren’t alone. If you know someone who’s been through something hard, offer her your non-judgmental ear. If you’re the one who’s been through something hard, eat the ice cream before it melts — and then go get help. But do it in that order, please. Don’t waste ice cream. =)