BLOG POST
Parenting in a Crisis
Yesterday, our house nearly flooded.
For hours, my 6-year-old and I formed a two-person bucket brigade - him filling buckets with the water threatening our front door, me carrying them past the house and down the hill. Twenty litres at a time, again and again and again.
Here's what I wasn't doing during those hours:
Being calm
Monitoring my tone of voice
Carefully considering my children's feelings
Gently validating emotions
When my 6-year-old told me he was tired, I wasn't compassionate. I simply told him he didn't have a choice and to keep bucketing water.
And you know what? That was exactly as it should be.
My nervous system was doing its job - flooding my body with the adrenaline and energy I needed to haul hundreds of litres of water for hours. I couldn't have done it without that activation, that dysregulation, that alarm. And I couldn't have done it without him. We stopped the house from flooding.
To the dear parents in the midst of the fires right now, or any other crisis:
You're not meant to be calm right now.
You're not meant to be balanced.
You're not meant to be worrying about feeling your feelings.
You're not meant to be worrying about the perfect words to use.
Your nervous system is doing exactly what it needs to do to keep you safe.
There is an added challenge when you're dealing with evacuation - all that survival energy courses through your body with nowhere to go. This is why anxiety can spike. The energy is designed to be used to solve problems.
In our flooding situation, even my children were using their activation energy. And because that energy found a release through action (and because the crisis is over and our home is fine) we all woke up this morning emotionally fine (though physically exhausted).
So please remember:
In a crisis, you're MEANT to be unbalanced.
If you can use that energy toward solving the problem, do.
If you can't, find another way to release it - it needs an outlet.
The processing, the careful words, the feeling your feelings - they all come later.
They're not for worrying about today, they're not even for considering until you're safe and that's okay.
Your children don't need you to be perfectly regulated right now.
They need you to keep them safe.
The rest will come in time.
You've got this.
