I Can't Imagine

My life hasn't been exactly charmed. I've been through some shit, as has my family around me. A friend of mine told me once, "Yanno, I think your reason for being on earth is so the rest of us can point and say 'Hey, things may be pretty crappy in my life right now, but at least I'm not...HER'".

I've been treated badly, physically and mentally. I've been divorced...twice. I lost custody of my two older children and could actually feel my soul weeping from the grief of it. I wore that sadness like a shroud for years and will always mourn what I lost. What WE lost.

I've been poor and jobless and damn near homeless. I almost lost my GOOD husband to death last year and before and since have watched him battle with cancer, and heart disease, and surgery after surgery and pain. So much pain it breaks my heart.

But I've been so very lucky as well.

Though it took years to fruition, we're Home- at last. I've had dear friends who died before getting Home, who died seeing that dream fade away still just over the horizon.

I've never lost a child to death. Never had a house go up in flames around me. Never been in an earthquake, or tornado, or hurricane, or wildfire.

And I can't imagine what my counterparts in Japan are going through. Or New Zealand. Or Haiti. Or anywhere else Mother Nature seems to be doling out punishment with a vengeance.

What do you do when the very firmament becomes unfirm? The wind so relentless, the waves so endless, the fires so devouring that there's no beginning or end to it?

How to keep your family safe when everything is dangerous?

I've always been able to DO something, GO somewhere, take some sort of action to move myself and my family out of harms' way if only by an inch.

My heart goes out to them all, as if I can will them strength to clutch their families a little closer, keep strong just a little longer,

till the earth stops shaking and is quiet again, and though nothing will ever be the same as before, and though they may want to give up and give in to despair and anguish, I know they'll gather their families and their courage and start over again

because that's what Moms do.