Terrified

Have you even been terrified? Not frightened or simply shocked, but truly terrified. That frenzied feeling of horror and lost control as you watch the foundation of your world shatter, but are unable to gather the pieces and create some vague resemblance of reality.

That happened to me today.

My daughter loves candy. While everyone else was eating hamburgers at her godbrothers cookout, she insisted on a piece of candy. After dinner mints, the kind that are chalky chewables. I assumed she would chew it. She didn't.

While sucking on it, she tried to reach for something and speak at the same time. The mint became lodged in her throat. In a ludicrous moment of panic, I held her arms above her head, hoping she was just coughing. She began to jump up and down, frantically trying to dislodge the course blockage. Our good friend who is a nurse just happened to be on one side of me and her friend, a day care provider was on the others side. Their backs were turned.

"Is that child choking?" The daycare provider swung around and snatched my baby before I could make a sound and began to administer the Heimlich. She swung Jada over her arm, face toward the ground, and began pumping her stomach and talking frantically. The rest of us were all simply frozen. I stood there in shock, watching this women pump my child in an attempt to induce vomiting. Then, just as it occurred to me that my everything, my child, could possibly die, the mint popped out amid a slew of saliva.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

I couldn't breathe. It took everything in me to not fall on my knees crying and thanking God. Everything I had to regain some sort of composure. Tears silently fell as I held my daughter, and thanked the woman in a distant quiet way. Distant because my brain hadn't quite released the fear I had just experienced, like some sort of aftershock reverberating through my soul. And the vibrations became louder and harder as the reality of what could have happened seeped into my thawing mind.

I held my daughter closely, I couldn't let her go. I couldn't believe that I had found myself so helpless, that when my daughters life was on the line I raised her hands above her head. I raised her hands above her head. What the hell? I have been meaning to take CPR since the birth of my daughter 7 years ago, yet here my baby twin found herself choking and I wasn't prepared. 5 children and I had let that type of necessary training fade away with other "must do's."

Terrified. That's what I was. And still am. I am still crying as I write this. I process pain so differently than others, because I have experienced so much of it and such a young age. Things and circumstances and relationships that most of my closest friends know nothing about. Wrapped up the pain, twisted the ends to keep it contained, and pushed it deep down.

But events like today, they unravel the tiewrap containing my hurt, poke holes in the ziploc of my emotions. Because terror continues long after the situation has been rectified. Like when someone breaks into your house. Afterward, you feel a new vulnerability, a raw festering wound, worried that it can happen again, that next time you won't be so lucky, that your sanctuary has been violated.

That's how I feel right now. My sanctuary of oblivion allowing me to believe that we were impervious to day to day catastrophes, has just been obliterated. And I sit here, still shaken, fighting the residue that terror has caused.