You would think that growing up in Southern California, I would be a seasoned disaster preparedness mom. Earthquake drills were a constant affair at school. We stocked cans of food and bottles of water in our garage. In my college dorm, a 6.7 earthquake threw me across the room when my bunk bed toppled over. My roommates and I nicked our bare feet on picture frames that had shattered on the floor.
But I also had a mother that completely freaked out at the slightest ground movement. She would scream hysterically (even if it was just a massive truck driving by), shove my brother and me under our thick oak kitchen table, then throw her trembling body over us. My father would just laugh and laugh. I would watch his round belly jiggling under his red robe and worry that the house was going to crush him.
In some of the worst earthquakes we lived through, my mom booked us a room on the Queen Mary because she thought that being on a boat would be the safest way to survive the aftershocks. Huddled with our friends and family on the deck, I peered through binoculars at the land mass worrying that at any time the earth would swallow up the rest of the world.
Shortly after Kyra was born, I felt a tremble ripple through my log cabin walls. The hair on my body stiffened. I fought every nerve in my body to calmly ride this earthquake through. I was not going to frighten my kids like my mother did. Besides, it had taken me hours to get Kyra to sleep and as you know we don’t wake a sleeping baby unless it’s an emergency. I gripped the edge of my desk and listened to the creaking of the wood and the clinking of my china and that thunder in my ear that seems to crescendo until I’m no longer sure if it’s the earthquake or a manifestation of all my fears from my childhood.
My knuckles turned white. I could see my heart pounding through my chest. And still the earthquake wasn’t passing. I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran down the hall, swooped up Kyra, and curled up beneath her bedroom doorframe. Pressed tightly against my chest, her heartbeat calmed me down and soon I realized that the birds twittered outside again, maybe even laughed at me the way my father used to tease my mom.
Fortunately, Kyra had no clue that her Mommee freaked out.
With tomorrow’s show in mind, I wondered what kind of disaster preparedness mom I was going to be as my children got wiser. Over dinner, I decided to talk to Kyra and Ethan about earthquakes. I asked Kyra if she had any earthquake drills at school.
“Nope. Mommee, tell me what an earthquake is.”
“Well, it’s when the earth suddenly releases energy that causes the ground to shake and our house to shake too.”
Kyra licked the spaghetti sauce off her lips and said, “I like earthquakes.”
Ethan said, “Me too.”
“Sometimes though earthquakes can hurt people. Buildings can fall down. Do you remember that scary 8.0 earthquake in China? Lots of kids were in school at the time. Some were kindergarteners just like you and their school fell on them.”
“Did they die?” Kyra asked.
“Some of them did. Many many people died in that earthquake.”
Kyra thought about all of this for a moment. I started to get nervous. Then she smiled and said, “That’s okay Mommee. I like dead.”
“You do?”
“Yes, dead makes me happy,” Kyra said as she twisted her fork with noodles.
Ethan said, “Me too.”
Either my kids did not understand what “dead” meant or I had done such a good job in explaining death to them that they weren’t scared of it. Kyra leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Her eyes spun with such delight and she danced in her seat. Ethan tickled her and the two of them collapsed into laughter.
An hour later, I tried again, “Kyra, do you know what an earthquake is?”
She squeezed her eyes shut as if she was thinking very hard, then said, “It’s when people die.”
“Well, earthquakes don’t always cause people to die. Just sometimes…” Oh god, was I making this worse? I picked up Kyra and held her in my arms. “Uh, are you scared of earthquakes now?”
“No!” Kyra said firmly.
Ethan ran towards us and pointed at his chest which displayed an enormous red “S” and and said, “I’m Super Man!”
Clearly, I wasn’t very good at explaining the big bad world to my children. But at least, they weren’t scared of it. And somehow, I didn’t want to mess with that. Do you think that’s okay?
