The minute I put the girls to bed the heavens open up and let loose all the rain that’s been promised for the last twelve hours. It’s lightning so much that it feels like we are on the inside of a strobe light. It’s thundering too, but Hadley doesn’t care about the thunder. She’s worried about lightning. Harper isn’t afraid of any of it. She sits at her lap desk and works on her scrapbook. Currently, she’s pasting pieces of artwork from the school year into her book.
I’m sitting in a chair reading a book when Hadley comes out and tells me she’s afraid of the lightning. I tell her I know, but that I think she’ll be fine.
Hadley’s been studying lightning for a science project so she knows a few things about it.
“The problem is,” she writes in her hypothesis, “I have to know what lightning is made of.” So she plans to find something in the house to make lightning. “I will take a balloon and rub it against my hair in the dark. I will touch the door knob with the balloon. I will see if lightning or sparks fly.”
But there are other thing she doesn’t know, like what happens if lightning strikes our house, or one of the trees that surround it. I tell her I don’t know for sure but that I don’t think that will happen.
“But what if it does? Will our house catch on fire?”
“I’m not sure,” I tell her but this does not satisfy Hadley. The fact that I don’t know makes her more upset.
Hadley’s peace comes from facts. She doesn’t like uncertainty. She doesn’t like the unknown. And unfortunately, the guy who knows how to talk to her about this is out of town. He’s telling others what they need to do in these sorts of storms, so I say to Hadley that I think we are safe but if she’d like to stay out here and read with me she can.
So she does.
She’s reading a Judy Moody book and I’m reading The Lady and Her Monsters, a sort of behind the scenes look at how Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
Tonight, after Hadley settled down in a chair to read her book, I pick up mine and this is the sentence I read: “On the night of Mary Godwin’s birth, August 30, 1797, a storm descended upon the city of London that was later remembered as one of the most awesome displays of thunder and lightning anyone had ever seen.”
That seems appropriate as Hadley and I read our own stories, side by side, watching the sparks fly.
I love that last line. You both found comfort in books that night (and in being together). Lovely.
Thanks, Michele!
you’re such a cool mom. like letting your kid have glue in her bed to work on her scrapbook. and letting your scared kid get back out of bed to read with you. i’m taking notes.
Well, I didn’t know about the glue, but she does love to read or play for a few minutes in bed. I like it that she’s comfortable in there so I don’t mind. Hadley does the same thing. I have very fond memories of being in my room for hours and I want that same safe plays for the girls to hang out with their imagination, you know?
i totally agree with them having their own space to be themselves. i just have seen my kids with glue and don’t want to be themselves with glue. or glitter. 🙂