Motherly instincts quickly emerge when thrown into eye of the storm

When high winds broke off the top of an old and very large blue spruce in my yard, I was asleep. But the sound of that big tree as it scraped the front of my house, dropping against the glass of the window behind me, brought me upright and out of my bed.

In one motion, I threw back the comforter and ran up the stairs to where my daughters slept.

The youngest was already out of her bed, standing in the dark room, shivering with cold and fear.

“Was it an earthquake?” she asked.

I knew a tree was down somewhere and I had half expected to find it through our roof. But there wasn’t any damage upstairs.

We turned on all the outdoor lights and I heard another daughter cry out.

The view from the front door was replaced by the dense, dark branches of the spruce. The yard was a mess.

I got the girls settled back into bed and they were asleep when the second part of the tree fell, this time landing across the driveway. I gave up. There wasn’t any use in going back to bed. The wind continued to blow as I poured a cup of coffee.

Before moving to the Northwest, we lived in the South – a place that is no stranger to damaging winds. Hurricanes, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes blow through with regularity.

When my children were small I spent many nights listening to weather reports and to the sound of the wind as it whipped through the tall pine trees over our house.

One night, during a particularly vicious storm, a loud clap of thunder woke me. The lightning was intense, one brilliant flash after another lit up the sky.

Frightened, I jumped up and ran to my young children to comfort them. I could hear them crying out for me.

I ran down the hallway to the point where it intersected with each child’s bedroom. And then I froze.

The wind was howling and thunder shook the house. And the lightning – I had never seen lighting like that. Flash, after flash, after flash.

By now, all of the children were crying. My son’s room was behind me, my oldest daughter’s to the right and the baby’s room straight ahead.

I didn’t know where to turn or what to do. Which one should I go to first?

The cries of my children were pulling me in three different directions and I was paralyzed. The awful lighting, one flash on top of another, filled the house with an eerie glow.

To be honest, when I finally found my feet, I don’t remember where I went first. To the baby, I guess. She was the closest.

The storm passed. The wind died down, and the thunder faded. But the lightning continued all night.

The next morning the sky was clear and blue, as it so often is after a storm.

That’s when we discovered that what we had thought was lightning was something else entirely. The high winds had caused two wires from the power lines beside the house to cross.

Each time they touched, and they had been blown together constantly in the storm, there was a flash.

In the morning light, it was easy to see that the long terrifying night hadn’t really been that bad.

Watching the sun rise the morning after the winds took out the spruce tree in my front yard, I thought about that other night. And how it felt to be overwhelmed by the realization that there was no way to be in all the places I was needed.

That is exactly the feeling that has plagued me so often as I have raised my children; when it felt as though whatever storm we were facing was bigger than I was; when I wanted so badly to do the right thing that I wasn’t able to do anything at all.

I guess for the most part, it wasn’t something I needed to think about at all.

Year after year, powered by instinct and fear – the primary fuel of parenting – I pulled myself together and ran toward each child as fast as I could go.