Hear them calling
Frayed ends of sanity
Hear them calling
Hear them calling me
– Metallica, The Frayed Ends of Sanity, 1988
Nine months today.
I never anticipated that we would still be in a state of flux nine months after that damn tornado!
And this week will likely be one of the most difficult since those initial days after the storm. I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced this much anxiety. Here’s the current scoop:
Tomorrow we have one of the final inspections scheduled. The final mechanical, electrical and plumbing inspection (MEP). If it fails anything then we have to fix issues and reschedule.
When the final MEP inspection passes, we can call for the Certificate of Occupancy (CO) inspection. Which at the earliest would happen on Wednesday, if the city is quick about turning it around and getting it scheduled.
We’ve got furniture scheduled to deliver on Thursday. If we don’t have that CO yet, they can deliver but not unwrap/unpack. It cannot look like anyone is potentially living there without the CO.
Our lease is up and keys are due Friday. Apartment has already got someone lined up to move in and won’t extend anymore.
We can’t move anything from the apartment into the house until we have the CO. So we’ve got movers on standby for Friday. If we get the CO we’ll move stuff in. If not we’ll probably park a uhaul behind the house and move stuff from the apartment into the uhaul.
If we don’t get the CO by Friday we’ll be hotel-ing it over the weekend and until that CO can be obtained.
I leave for San Francisco for a week on Monday for a conference. I’m scheduled to speak at 4 different sessions so it’s not something I can cancel.
It’s all like a set of dominoes stacked up in a line. If they are spaced correctly and fall as expected we’ll get to where we need to be. If not, the process comes to a halt.
I’m not exactly what you would call a control freak, but I am a planner. I’m habitually early when I need to be somewhere and like to have my ducks in a row. So this ‘not knowing’ is a huge challenge for me. Not knowing whether we’ll have a place to move our things. Not knowing where we’ll lay our heads Friday night. Not knowing if when I leave on my business trip that Don and the kids will be settled in our home.
Needless to say the rope holding my sanity has been on a slow burn for the past few weeks.
If you see me over the next few days and I look or act like a rabid, snarling dog, now you know why. I’ll apologize in advance. There’s only so much a girl can take. I feel like these nine months have aged me by at least a decade.
Sorry for the downer post – hopefully the next post will be filled with joy at finally getting our home back!
So I wrote this post yesterday about Adjusting Expectations and how I am realizing that it’s ok not to be able to do what I used to be able to do and that the best thing would be to adjust my own personal expectations.
So I’ve pulled out my marauder’s map and evaluated life as it is currently and here are the adjustments I am vowing to make:
I’m going to skip school events that aren’t totally necessary. Now this doesn’t mean I won’t be involved. I’ll still read all the papers that come home and get the Remind101 Notifications and fill out all the forms (so. many. forms.) But, while it would be nice to attend back to school night and book fair night and even meet the teacher night <gasp>, these nights are typically chaotic, provide you with a few distracted minutes maximum with teachers and throw off the evening routines for everyone. Once we get back into the house and settled, we can start them up again, but I’m giving myself leave to just say no for a little while.
I’m going to stop ‘expecting’ stuff to happen on the house and start being pleased with everything I see that has changed. Too many times our contractor says, “this and this are going to start on x day” and when it doesn’t happen I get disappointed and sad. It seeps into the rest of the day and my relationships. At this point I can see the light at the end of the tunnel so I’m just gonna hang on and try to be Suzy Sunshine until we get approved to move back in!
I’m vowing to not sweat the small stuff at work. With the acquisition we’re going through, decisions don’t get made quickly and just finding out who needs to be involved in said decisions has been difficult. I’m used to a quick pace with lots of leeway and easy access to decision makers so this is a change for me. Things will work themselves out as they need to! Meanwhile I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and spend a little time on documentation and cleanup in my org! I’ll take advantage of the time for that!
Some adjustments are harder than others and this one is a big one. I’m leaving the band. No, it’s not to strike out on my own and it’s not due to irreconcilable differences with my band mates. It’s just the perfect storm right now – the band is ramping up for Dreamforce with songs and videos and rehearsals and these next few weeks between work and the kids and the house I just don’t feel like I’m able to put in 100%. And that’s not fair to the others who are organizing and participating and giving it their all! When we started out the band it was just for a single live performance, which turned into a few laid back videos, but has evolved into this much larger thing. I love writing the parodies and have a ton of fun singing with the group, but if I can’t go all in, then I am short-changing them and I don’t want to do that. So I’m stepping back and am looking forward to being a Groupie!
Another adjustment that is long overdue is a health-check. I’ve never exactly been a health nut (just a regular old nut), but my eating habits have gone downhill, I drink too many beers at night and don’t exercise to speak of. I know if I ate better, drank less and worked out more I’d ultimately create some more balance in my life so I’m challenging myself to do better! And if doing better helps me feel better then it is a win/win!
So there are my adjustments for now – I can officially say “Mischief Managed” and put away that map.
After Dreamforce and after we are in the house and settled again I can re-evaluate my evaluations. For now this shall do!
So as we all know this year has been quite the doozy. I’ll be honest in saying that getting through this year has really been me telling myself to suck it up and keep moving. Like that point in a marathon when you have hit a wall – you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and eventually you get to the end of the race. Or you collapse. Either way, the race is over!
I feel like we’ve sort of come to the pinnacle of the roller coaster ride. The house is so close to being done I can finally believe we’ll be back home soon. Dust is finally settling on our acquisition so we can begin to work through the necessary system changes and needs. And Dreamforce is almost upon us!
I’ve always been the type of person to jump in with both feet for everything I commit to. I’m excited and passionate about learning and doing and being. And typically that works well. My personal expectations are that I will get things done, and learn during that process.
This year my personal expectations and personal reality have taken two different directions. I think that is what has caused a lot of stress this year. I’m used to and expect myself to do certain things. But this year it has been harder and harder to meet those expectations. When you are accustomed to doing something, it is incredibly frustrating to not be able to reach that anymore. You question yourself and might even push yourself harder, but that doesn’t always work. In fact sometimes it backfires on you pushing you into an even deeper pit of frustration.
School starting really made it hit home that I needed to re-evaluate my personal expectations. Between work changes, trying to manage our rebuild, my outside commitments like the Nerdforce podcast, Apex and the Limits, my usual blogging and community involvement, and then add on getting the kids to/from 3 different schools (because they can’t figure out the bussing for us tornado folks), trying to be an involved parent and ensuring they get homework done and where they need to be, I finally hit the wall of my reality and have realized that the only way to stay healthy and emotionally get through it all, something has got to give.
And that something is really my own personal expectation of what I can and can’t do as well as what I should and should not be focusing energy on.
I’ve come to realize that just because my expectations don’t match reality, doesn’t mean I have to lower my expectations. Just that I need to make adjustments.
I need to give myself grace and acceptance and not make myself feel as if I’m failing at life.
I need to understand that my expectations were perfectly ok for this time last year. But that this year, circumstances and reality have changed, so I must change my expectations to more adequately align with that changing reality.
It’s hard for me to accept that I need to make adjustments. I’m my own worst critic when it comes to life and I tend to judge myself harshly.
By writing this all down and publishing it, I hope to serve as my own reminder that it is OK to not meet my own expectations. Recognizing the need and adjusting them is the healthy and right thing to do.
And as I reach the peak of the hill on this roller coaster, I hope that by adjusting my expectations and making a few tweaks, I can enjoy that rush downhill with my hands in the air and a smile on my face.
Have you evaluated your own expectations lately? Are they in line with your reality? Do you make regular changes or beat yourself up and pile on the internal pressure when they seem out of reach? What advice would you give?
8 months since we went from celebrating a great Christmas to picking up pieces of our lives amidst the rubble of our home.
I still pinch myself and think, ‘How in the world did this happen to me? Is this real?’ But then the upstairs apartment neighbor flushes his toilet and hearing the rush of the water through the thin walls lets me know it isn’t a dream.
We are getting very close to going home. I seriously cannot wait until we can go in and sit down and just soak up the quiet and the stillness in that house!
So much has happened this year, from the stupid tornado to losing mom, to my silly parody band getting actual gigs, to my company being acquired. The kids have started another school year and the family has learned that while we love each other very much, we all very much need space of our own!
I still don’t know how we’ll go about letting each of you know how much your support has meant to us. The kindness we’ve experienced still makes me all verklempt when I think too long about it. Just know that it’s pretty much what has kept us going.
This year has forever changed our family. My kids will be different people for having gone through it. We have a deeper respect for mother nature and will never take insurance for granted.
I’d also like to take this post to publicly apologize to my kids and husband for the lunatic I’ve been the past 8 months. I can’t promise all the crazy will go away when we get back into the house, but at least when I do get a little, um, high strung, y’all can send me to my craft room for some alone time!
This post is the fourth in a series I’m writing about our tornado experience. You can read from the beginning with the first post here.
So I ended my last post in this series as we made it out of the neighborhood hours after the tornado and here we are seven (yes, 7) months later. A lot has happened in between. I’ll try to give you an abridged version.
The story continues:
We get to my sister’s house several hours after the tornado. We’ve left our home open to the elements and potential looters (yup – looting started almost immediately after the storm hit and continues to this day in the effected neighborhoods). We borrow clothes to sleep in and ‘try’ to settle into my sister’s guest room.
In the middle of the night another doozy of a storm complete with house-shaking lightning and thunder rolls through along with heavy rainfall. Needless to say, sleep wasn’t easy.
The morning after:
As a mother you want to always protect and provide for your kids. Let me tell you, waking up the morning after the tornado was a low point for me. We are in borrowed clothes, sleeping on borrowed beds. We’ve got the underwear we are wearing and not even a toothbrush between us. I’ve never gone through something so humbling.
We check the phones and media and gear up to head over to check out the house in the daylight. It has been raining non-stop since the storm and the rain continues. Had it not been for that rain, we would have been able to save so much, but the rain destroyed what was left in the downstairs and left several inches of water in my beloved Mini Cooper since the sunroof was broken by a piece of roof decking.
To get back into the neighborhood we had to show ID. Police volunteers from all over the metroplex area were helping control traffic and try to keep looting to a minimum. I recorded the videos below upon our first visit back. They are hard for me to watch – the emotions were raw and you’ll hear that in my voice. The first is the front of the house and the second is from the back.
We sifted through and tried to save what we could that day – just threw things in tubs and boxes. A day or two later, we had a few companies that specialize in cleanup come out to see what they could save. My husband worked with them and saved a lot of the electronics (TVs and Appliances), as well as a good portion of kitchen housewares. I found it incredibly difficult and couldn’t physically sift through the rubble. Seeing my things spread out all over, soaking wet and ruined was too much. It literally made my stomach ache every time we went over there.
Meanwhile, the local community had begun action. There were so many relief efforts it was hard to take them all in. We’ve always been able to provide for our kids and family, usually on a budget and sometimes on a shoestring, but having to walk into a middle school and pick up bags of toiletries and donated clothing and necessities was a first for us. And hard. So. Freaking. Hard.
But we had nothing. No toothbrushes. No socks. No tampons. No nothing. The boys are young enough that accepting donated items was not a big deal. For the teenager it was agony. We were given some gift cards and it is amazing how quickly you can drop hundreds of dollars buying necessities for a family of five. When you buy things a little here and a little there it doesn’t seem like a lot. When you have to buy for everyone all at once it is sticker shock!
We were blessed to have all of our immediate needs met since we were able to stay with family in the days after and quickly accessed resources. For people not looped into social media, with no family nearby, it was a much more difficult few days.
Nevertheless, we contacted out insurance company and got the ball rolling on a claim. We had just purchased the house 9 months before, so our policy was new and very valid. It was also a good policy. Over the course of this journey we have dealt with 5 different adjusters: one for the structure, one for the cars, one for the emergency living expenses, one for the temporary housing, and one for the contents.
Both of our cars were damaged. My Mini was totaled, so we were immediately without one vehicle. My husband’s car was about a year old and sustained just over 16K in damage – it spent 31 days in the shop. So while homeless and dealing with the house, we were also trying to figure out transportation. Due to the sheer number of houses affected, we knew temp housing would go quickly and immediately contacted an apartment complex to get the ball rolling on a place to live. And add in all the other stuff: calling utilities to either cancel or put a hold on accounts, arrange mail holds at the post office until we have a forwarding address, meeting with the various adjusters and potential contractors, filling out endless piles of paperwork. Meanwhile, we were both lucky to have jobs where they said ‘take the time you need’ – so we didn’t have to stress about going in to work in the immediate days after. The to-do list was neverending and frankly very overwhelming. So many decisions to be made. And little eyes watching us as we navigated through the aftermath.
In a previous post I mentioned losing my mom during all this. Three weeks after the tornado hit she passed away. Those weeks are a blur for me as I look back on them. I’m sure I was a bit of a walking zombie for the entire month of January. It was blow after blow. And try to explain to an 8 year old why everything that was ‘his’ is gone, including the presents from Santa, and now Grandma is gone too. It’s impossible for me to wrap my head around so much loss, so I can’t begin to image what has been going on in his little mind.
Over the next few months we’ve worked with our contractors to rebuild. The insurance company totaled the structure – which means they gave us the max payout. We could have chosen to take that money, pay off our mortgage and sell the property, but we didn’t. When we bought the house we fell in love with it. It was the ‘forever house’ where the kids would grow up. We couldn’t walk away from it and the neighborhood after this. It would have felt like we were abandoning it. So maybe that means we ‘chose’ to live in chaos for months, but it wasn’t a choice for us. We wanted our home back. That’s it.
Getting the max payout for the structure was good for us. It meant we don’t have to haggle with the insurance company about every little thing that gets repaired. They cut a check for the structure, end of story. It just means that we had to demo and try to rebuild for that amount. We’ve had some struggles with our construction company (mainly delays) and are on our third ‘Super’. We probably could have been done by now if there were so many changes in personnel. There are so many rebuilds going on in the area, that workers and subcontract labor is scarce and companies are luring bodies away left and right which throws off schedules.
So here we are at the seven month mark.
Living in a two bedroom apartment with 5 people. An apartment with rented furniture. Still making lists of contents we lost cause we think of something almost everyday. Visiting the house on an almost daily basis. Frustrated over the lack of progress some days. Missing the pool and private backyard in this 100 degree Texas weather. Extending the lease because of delays. Stressing about whether we’ll have to extend the lease again. Tired and sometimes rage-ey because I just wanna go home.
And please, please, please never, ever tell a tornado or flood or other disaster survivor: “But at least you’re getting a new house when it’s all said and done!”
I guarantee you not one survivor would go through this again just to get a shiny new house. I would take my old house back in an instant if we could turn back time. I could care less about the shiny and new. I just want my house. I want my space. I want the kids to feel like they have a home again. I want to not tense up when I hear about pending storms. I want to go through a day and not have to make decisions about plumbing or electrical or send my kids to school on a special ‘tornado’ bus. I want everything to be like it was.
I feel like we’ve sort of come to the pinnacle of the roller coaster ride. The house is so close to being done I can finally believe we’ll be back home soon. Dust is finally settling on our acquisition so we can begin to work through the necessary system changes and needs. And Dreamforce is almost upon us!
