Something scary happened tonight. I asked the girls to go upstairs and
put away all the laundry I folded today. There was a lot of it. K6
needed hangers and I had a bunch hanging in the wardrobe in our room. The wardrobe is old and is made up of three pieces stacked together. K6
didn't realize this, and when she couldn't reach the hangers, she
climbed up inside the wardrobe to reach. She lost her balance and fell, holding on to the middle frame, pulling the top two parts of the wardrobe down on top of her.
I was downstairs at the time, trying to convince E5 to help pick up the
living room. We heard a crash and then we heard a scream. And then we
kept hearing a scream. It sounded like a scary movie scream that kept
going and going and going.
I'm not one to normally overreact when my kids get hurt. I've always thought if you stay calm, it helps them stay calm, and usually
it's not that big of a deal. The scream flipped a switch inside me
tonight, though, and I ran up the stairs as fast as I could. Craig was
already in the room and had already lifted the wardrobe off of K6.
She's fine, by the way. Perfectly fine. And the scream wasn't coming
from her; it was coming from M10. M10 was in the room with her, had
asked her to get the hangers, saw her climb up into the wardrobe,
watched her fall, and witnessed the wardrobe coming down on top of her,
powerless to do anything about it other than scream.
She was scared. She thought K6 had been seriously hurt, maybe even the
unthinkable. She blamed herself because she had asked for the hangers.
Gravity sunk in when Craig informed me that E5 had been sitting
directly in the path of the wardrobe only minutes before. Whereas K6
was inside it when it came down and thus didn't bear the weight of it
when it fell, E5 would have been crushed had she still been where she
was.
It's easy to play the "what if" game with scenarios like this. What if I had put the laundry away myself after folding it? What if M10 had retrieved her own hangers? What if K6 had stuck with folding rags instead of anything else? What if E5 had stayed in that spot?
Fact is, "what if" doesn't do anybody any good. It wasn't anyone's fault and the unthinkable didn't happen. And if it did, it still wouldn't have been anybody's fault. But it's scary to think about and sometimes the weight of it doesn't hit you for several hours.
The weight of it hit K6 right away (both literally and figuratively). After she calmed down (she wasn't screaming, but she was definitely crying), she found me and said, "I could have died tonight if the wardrobe hit me somewhere else, couldn't I have?" I stared at her for a second and then slowly began to nod. She then said, "But I didn't because God protected me and saved me, so I'm okay and don't even have a scratch or a broken bone." I stared again and again nodded.
The simplicity of that understanding was all she needed. She was fine, she wasn't really hurt, and she believed with all her heart that God saved her life tonight. She will remember this for a long time, maybe even forever.
And for me? I hope I remember it forever, too. I'm more apt to want to get rid of the wardrobe or punish myself for not being present in the room when it happened. Facts remain: it wasn't anyone's fault and the Lord did spare her life. That needs to be enough. For now. For forever.
Thanks, God, for protecting my family tonight.