Mama Stress

Today goes down as one of the top 10 most stressful in my life.

 Around 1:00 I got an email that soccer games were cancelled tonight.  That seemed strange, since it wasn't raining.  So I got online to check the weather and saw that there had been two tornado touchdowns nearby. Within minutes tornado sirens were going off around me.  And shortly after that my building was evacuated to the ground floor.  The upper floors of a glass building are not the place to be in a tornado.

The storms swung east and I was able to return to my office. But east was toward home--where my kids were. And I was blocked from them by a line of severe thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes.

I took solace in the fact that the kids were still at school.  That the school was surely safer than most any other place they could be.  Any my nanny texted to let me know that she went to my house early.

And then tornadoes started to touch down within miles of my home and the kids' school.  One was heading directly toward them. The meteorologist started naming off the schools it was heading toward and ours were in the path. It hit two schools in a neighboring town.

My paralegal (who lives in the same town and also had kids in school) and I just sat in my office watching in horror as the tornadoes headed toward our kids. We were helpless.  There is not much worse in this world than watching a tornado move toward your kids and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

My only comfort was that the schools were safe buildings.  PS was texting me that there were under their desks in lockdown.  The school district sent emails that the kids would not be dismissed until the storms had passed.

But then, I got a text from SS saying "there is marble size hail and tornadoes all around us."  I asked, "where are you?"  And she said "in the closet under the stairs."  At home.  During a very short break between two lines of storms, my idiotic school district put my ten-year-olds on a bus and sent them home.

The sirens started going off again while they were on the bus.  And so the idiotic bus driver dropped them at their stop and said "run as fast as you can to your house."

Thankfully my nanny was there. But how many kids did my idiotic school district send home to empty houses when there were tornadoes moving toward our town and neighborhood?

I am furious.  The school district will be hearing from me tomorrow.  What the fuck were they thinking?

In the end, we are all ok.  I left work as soon as the tornadoes passed, and picked PS up from school at about 5:00. But it is horrifying to watch the aftermath on the news and imagine that my kids could have been in the middle of it all.