“Mommy, I was scared last night.”
“I’m sorry, baby. What were you scared about?”
“The weather was scary.”
“I get that, B. But that’s why we go to the basement when there is severe weather. So we can be safe from the storm. Aren’t we lucky to have a basement? And a house to protect us?
“Yeah.”
“And are we safe today?”
“Yeah.”
“See? No big thing.”
…..
Ohhhh, the little white lies I sometimes tell my children. Because I, too, have a fear of storms. You can hardly tell from the picture above, right? We look happy as larks, right? But storms have me shakin’ in my boots. And so the same words I shared with my oldest today, I roll around in my mind, too, on many an occasion. We have a basement. We will be safe.
I’ve been somewhat terrified of tornadoes since I was, I think, a kindergartener or first grader and I spent the night at 4H camp. There was a tornado warning. And we had little shelter. Definitely nothing underground. And though everything ended up being fine in the end, I feel as though I felt nervous about storms from that moment on. And then, there was the day that I cried and cried during CAT testing, when the sky was filled with lightning and thunder, just days after our first school tornado drill. You know the drills, right? The ones where they make you huddle on the floor with your hands over your head. Because that’s not terrifying for an 8 year old. And then… then we read Night of the Twisters. And I think, for awhile after that, I was pretty much a goner. And that fear just stuck with me. Though not as intense as it was as a child, and much less anxiety-producing now, I don’t like the unknown and unpredictability that comes with really severe weather.
But instead of telling B all of that, instead, I just told him it can be scary. And that we need to go in the basement, but if we do, we’re pretty darn safe. Because while I like to be honest with him, I guess there’s a little bit of the scary stuff that I just want to cushion him from, for now. Is that wrong? Maybe I should just explain it all, scientifically. I mean, after all, the kid loves Planet Earth. Perhaps he would think it was less scary if I just gave him the facts. Should I just lay it all out there? That we take cover because Mother Nature has the ability to huff and puff and blow our house down?
I just do not know.
I don’t really want to tell him that I’ve seen the real damage storms can do. I don’t share with him that some of my high school mates lost their homes in a tornado. Or that some of our very close family friends were lucky enough that they took shelter in a bathroom which survived the twister that ripped the rest of their house to shreds. And I definitely can’t tell him that for the last three years, every time a tornado siren sounds, I think of his first pre-school teacher whose son was killed when a tornado hit a Boy Scout camp in 2008.
Instead, I just tell him that warnings happen all the time. And that as long as we are smart and we heed the warnings, and take shelter from the storms, we will be safe. And it’s no big thing. And during the warnings, we can then be happy as larks.
Are you a storm chaser or do you hide out and hunker down? How do you talk with your kiddos about things that are out of your control? Do you tell them what Mother Nature is capable of or do you pretend that all is swell in the eye of a storm?
