My Tornado of Death

Her outstretched hands, 10 perfect fingers, each 5 attached to their rightful palm. Pillows of toddler pudge held the paper up to me. She stretched every fiber in her little being, willing her gift closer towards me.

It’s for you. I drew it for you.

She proudly announced.

Take it!

Her request was layered with the beginnings of exasperation. She shook her gift in front of me.

I thanked her as I took the paper from her hands. Another art piece to obligatorily display on the refrigerator. An addition to the seemingly endless ticker tape of crayon and colored pencil scribbles.

Not long ago preschool art was proudly displayed as colorful decor, yet recently it had become nothing more than an oppressive cover. An endless output to smother me and my modern appliance. 3 year old twins and a newborn. A recent parade of melancholia rained down upon my expectations of motherhood.

I looked down on the paper she had handed me. Monochrome hues, scribbled in fury and haste over 8 ½ by 11 inches of white. Technicolor to my postpartum grayscale.

It’s for you!

She reminded me, pulling me back to the moment. 3 year olds never let our thoughts stray far from present.

Wow, Emrie. It’s, it’s so, so, uh, so bright and magnetic! And the circle, I mean oval. The oval spirals so… so….

I stopped myself.

I had absolutely zero artistic appreciation of the circumferential pink squiggles that had invaded the space that had once been clean and quiet. Free from emerging artistic expression. White. Untouched. Free.

So, what is it?

I asked, flatly. All pretenses and politeness gone.

My tornado of death. My pink tornado of death.

She declared proudly, completely unaffected by my insincerity.

I was in my own tornado of death. My tornado, the deaths have pulled at me over the last 10 years. At times the storm was persistent and subtle. Occult. At other times it raged, growing exponentially in strength and size. I had yet to notice the house was falling down around me. Likely because while it was my tornado, it was never my death. A fury had blown alongside me, existing on a parallel plane. An ever present reality yet nothing I had ownership of. Never something I could convey in pink crayon and innocently claim as mine. Storm winds can blow the hardest just outside of the eye.

I would have lost count, if I had ever really tracked tracked them. I stopped counting before I received tangible 8 ½ by 11 evidence of my competence. I stopped counting at five.

The first — His face forever impressed on my psyche. 10 long and thin, adolescent fingers. Each 5 attached to their rightful palm.

My nursing license had not yet arrived in the mail.