Michelle Martin: The Family Room

Stormy weather

When the first storm warning beeped and flashed across the bottom of the television, Caroline looked up and saw the word “tornado.”

“Mom, I’m scared,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not for here. It’s for Will and Kane and Kendall counties. We live in Cook County.”

After a short explanation of what a county is, she calmed down. It didn’t last.

The familiar beep … I didn’t look up from the sinkful of dinner dishes I was washing. Then “Mom, I saw the tornado warning, and the top of Illinois was all red. I’m scared!”

I know the feeling. As a child, I was terrified of storms, of thunder and lighting and violent winds and most of all, the idea of a tornado, an idea reinforced by school drills that involved sitting on the floor, hands clasped over our heads until we go cramps in our shoulders.

As a teenager, I started to leave that fear behind, coming to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of wild weather, once even catching sight of a funnel cloud in the distance. At some point, I realized that tornadoes might bedevil the Midwest, but rarely cause damage in the city of Chicago, where masses of buildings break up the open spaces that cyclones love to sweep across.

Caroline isn’t there yet. She’s too old to be sheltered from the bad things that happen, whether tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands, hurricanes that kill thousands or twisters that kill more than a dozen. We can reassure her tsunamis and hurricanes won’t hurt her at home, living more than 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean, but tornadoes come a bit too close.

On the other hand, she’s too young to evaluate the risks, and her ability to manage them. She’s afraid of scary things because they are scary, not because they are likely. Or maybe it’s just that she can’t ignore those fears that she can do nothing about.
That’s really how most adults handle things. Afraid of death? Pretend it will never happen. Afraid of terrorist attacks? Take away the flying public’s nail scissors, and pretend you’ve made them safe. Some dangers are so constant that they are like background noise: usually unnoticeable.

My husband was a child when Richard Speck killed eight nurses on the South Side of Chicago and then was hunted for days before being arrested. He remembers it as a watershed event, when the world suddenly became a much more scary place, and people who never locked their doors shot the bolts.

I’m 10 years younger, and don’t remember a time when the world was seen as safe. We always locked doors at night. When, as a child, I watched them dig the bodies of dozens of young boys from underneath John Wayne Gacy’s home, people were horrified, but not especially shocked that such a thing could happen.

The 9/11 attacks happened when Caroline was 3, when keeping the TV off or tuned to PBS kids shows could more or less keep her in the dark about what had happened.

That doesn’t work any more. She can read the newspaper headlines and draw her own conclusions from the world around her. Now she needs to find a way to cope with it all.

So far, she seems to be turning toward the best source I can think of. At night when we pray, she asks God to keep her and her loved ones safe, and often adds words of care for those caught in disasters. I pray that she will keep turning to God.

Martin is a staff writer for The Catholic New World.E-mail her at [email protected].