How a Hurricane Destroyed a Family and Saved my Life |
Issue 18
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There was an old saying that storm surge caused more damage than any other part of a hurricane when I was growing up, but I didn't believe them because I knew better. I'd survived so many tropical storms by this point, not even Mother Earth could scare me with her little tantrums anymore. Hurricanes weren't deadly unless you were stupid. Too stupid to prepare. Too stupid to have a job and enough money to prepare before everyone and their fucking brother overbought for themselves, leaving the poor to rely on the army like how after Hurricane Ian, all the MRE's were not just relied on but life saving for a majority of local families.
Yeah, we took a direct hit from Ian and it was a doozy - the first hurricane to burst through a window in my childhood home, letting the wind start whipping in from underneath, pulling at the ceiling like a can that nature was ready to pop. I wondered if we were the sardines lying in wait for our predator, the wind, to consume us. This wasn’t just another hurricane and we’d all huddled up in the childhood home as if it were to protect us through yet another major storm…as if it didn’t have limits, too. Dad had to fight the whipping winds to reboard that one window up but that wasn't the worst of it. We still had to hold the glass doors that weren’t boarded because us really smart native Floridians hadn’t thought to board them up. “No, they’ll be fine,” Dad said before Ian crawled onto shore while nighttime approached alongside him, eventually uniting howling winds with random cracks, snaps and screams. It was terrifying and then, the power went out. In the dark, the entire house shook like we were in the palm of a god who seemed angry, ready to crush us. The storm felt vengeful, alive. In fact, once we heard the rattling of his growls pressing against those glass doors, we were sent, pressing our bodies against the glass instinctively, somehow knowing to share the load else we all might die. We didn’t want to know what would happen if those glass doors had burst in, letting the wind overtake the home and rip it all to shreds within minutes. Simultaneously, we knew that if we didn’t apply the right amount of pressure, that glass might burst against our bodies and slice us into pieces in front of our children. Once we were there, we were there, too…pressed against those doors for minutes that felt like hours and hours that felt like days. I mean, there was no leaving else guaranteed burst glass, winds inside, lost roof and lost lives. No one wanted to be the reason we all died so we all just… did our part. What an odd reminder of the way that I grew up. The wind suddenly started to feel like the silence forced on us as children, then expected to remain as we grew into adults and had children of our own. It took six hours for Ian to finish unleashing his wrath on us to where we could walk away from the doors and not fear beheading or impalement. Six hours side by side with a family who wouldn’t be caught in this position unless it were some life-or-death scenario. And it didn’t make any sense given we’d chosen to do this to ourselves willingly. We chose not to evacuate, chose to ride out the storm in a 50-year-old house, chose to be one of the few locals who “stayed put” to watch the house as it was picked apart like a cheese platter at a slumber party. We chose to stay, proving some “strong family unit” could ride out something as powerful as a category 5 hurricane… but the truth prevails in the end. When Mom tried to cast demons out of the clouds with her language of tongues while holding the glass panels, it felt like the storm coughed a laugh in her direction. The winds grew a little stronger. My sister followed her footsteps at her glass panel, praying loudly and asking Jesus to save us all. Our hands are what held that glass together, though. No one would bother to give the credit where it was due. Dad stayed quiet, as usual. I couldn’t even act surprised about it. And me? I just silently sobbed and tried to keep my face hidden while applying pressure on the glass door, doing exactly what was expected of me and staying quiet about how it felt. It was just another day in the Richardson household. Maybe I just wanted to have it all, selfishly: the fake family who uses religion to “save lives” that weren’t lost to begin with. Maybe I wanted to have the acceptance of them loving me while also somehow still being able to be myself just enough to not want to die… but I couldn’t. Ian came to prove that it can’t all be had. Something had to give and this time, everything did. It all collapsed at once. My family didn’t make the news or the obituaries after Ian, thankfully. We’d survived something special but none of us felt that way afterwards. In the morning after the storm had passed, we all kept looking at each other blankly as if to say: “you idiot, you should’ve left” but knowing deep down that we all chose the same thing and… we all had that same broken look in our eyes. Saying anything wouldn’t have helped at that point, what was done was done. We didn’t even know a hurricane could be that powerful. Similarly, I wondered if our parents had ever understood that power behind their neglect. But oh, we were so determined and brave before that storm, just like a young Betty and Richard in 1987 who thought they had what it took to raise two children. Some nuclear family that couldn’t be drowned out by a hurricane but instead, would be murdered by the hands of its own creators in some pitiful display of “generational trauma”. To me, there’s no excuse to ever raise a hand towards a child, or diminish the way that they feel and, fuck, imagine that! Being raised in a way that promotes silence, self-abandonment and abuse and then to be flooded with feelings as safety is found in the very places they warned us about. Imagine that same comedown happening in 2022: adrenaline of “I’m going to stay for this major, life-threatening Hurricane!” to survival instincts and “I’m going to die” and finally to “I just survived something I could’ve left for.” Talk about having to sit with those feelings… let alone having to start healing from that depth of self-betrayal. Did I ever mention that I was scared of thunderstorms as a child? After Ian, I couldn’t help clean up the family yard or house. I was the bad daughter – that was my choice that morning. My sister overstayed her welcome (Mom said on the phone three days later) and I left the second I could, went back home and found a church willing to loan me a generator and an AC unit. My house wasn’t very damaged and I was done with holding up glass panels as if they somehow covered the blaring truth: not a single person in that makeshift home gave a rat’s ass about anyone but themselves – nothing had changed since I was a child and that was not the way I wanted to define family or love. Those people in that house, we were all just strangers pretending to be a family, not able to stand each other but worse, not able to stand the parts of ourselves that we couldn’t yet face. Well, I can speak to that part because I’ve since faced them. The truth is, we were all there out of obligation and not out of love. Well, Hurricane Ian dismantled my blood family, which was already crumbling at the foot. My sister, the compulsive liar and attention-seeker, developed an “anxiety condition” that became the gossip of the family unit for the next few months. Meanwhile, my attachment issues from the years of parental emotional neglect and sibling abuse were still left unresolved, not allowed to be spoken about. But god forbid I relapse on booze and then, there would be another family gossip – the alcoholic daughter who can’t keep clean and it had nothing to do with her childhood at all! See, if we could blame a storm for the family’s problems, then that was okay. But if we were going to blame the family for the family’s problems, well then that’s where we draw the line. And when my sister’s new condition became the hot-topic and my cries for help had been ignored for my entire lifetime, I chose to step away from the family entirely. I’d been no contact before and this time, I knew it was a final act of self-love. Come to think of it, I probably didn’t help clean up the childhood home after Ian because it was never my job to, and I always knew that. So, metaphorically, symbolically, whatever – the mess didn’t matter to me because it was never mine. It was never my job to clean up what was left behind by neglectful adults daring to call themselves protectors. Parents. Storm-chasers. People who stayed when it was evidently time to leave. People who didn’t value safety for their children. The aftermath of Ian was disgusting. In fact, I’ve forgotten to tell my part of the story at all and isn’t that symbolic, too? How the family scapegoat seems to always forget themselves, even after escaping? Well, after Ian, I sat down on my sofa on a random Wednesday, started thinking about my childhood and the things I was going to eventually have to face. A day turned into a week and after depression tightened its grip, an entire two years had suddenly passed and the only thing that had grown was the size of my ass. So, when it came time for the next major storm, Helene, I was stupid. I was poor, stupid, unprepared, and worse – I was fat and without a support system. I didn’t want to imagine a time without air conditioning or popcorn and hell, at least Hurricane Helene wasn’t supposed to hit us, right? She was just skimming along the coast. But she brought in water. Enough water to flood a town. More water than the news had posted and more water than the Weather Channel had warned of and I found out when my backyard was black little waves of storm surge. Having finally pried myself off the ass shaped cushion because the house had started to tremble, I stood mortified, watching as the sea sloshed outside my porch. I was surrounded by the ocean. Men were screaming for help outside. Water was reaching underneath my screened door like little dog tongues lapping away at what might be peanut butter inside. Frozen, I felt more fear than I’d felt in my entire life – that deep dread that’s paralyzing, more fear than I’d felt during Ian. It wasn’t that I was afraid of dying but instead, I had children in another room sleeping and they didn’t do a single thing to deserve drowning. They didn’t do a single thing to deserve a mother that didn’t evacuate them. They didn’t do a single thing to deserve a mother who acted stupid. When I first wrote this piece, I wrote here that this is the part where I didn’t put on my game face but that was actually a lie, I just wasn’t able to see it at the time. Funny how childhood trauma does that to someone. At this point in my life, when my backyard was under two foot of storm surge and I was the heaviest I’d ever been, I chose to call an old friend and get help evacuating the children. That was my form of a game face – that was the best I could do for us then. And the truth of it is, in hindsight, I can see that I always did the best that I could. After we evacuated that night, within a week I had everything I could possibly pack in the back of my SUV, my kids in the backseat and we were driving north, looking for a new home. Fat can’t be shed quickly but bought ignorance can be. Generational trauma can be fought, collective stupidity can be escaped, and I chose to outgrow those skins right there, leaving that idiocy at the Florida state line. I’d never place my children in danger again due to my own negligence, stupidity and self-hatred. It didn’t matter what I’d been through, and it didn’t matter how badly I’d been hurt – innocent beings didn’t deserve mistreatment or suffering because of my own irresponsibility. Truthfully, I did put my game face on after my backyard became the ocean. A few months after Helene destroyed the fat life I’d built in Florida, my children and I had a tiny apartment in Central Pennsylvania. We had started life all over again and I found a new reason to get my body back into shape: to prove to my children that anyone can change if they try hard enough. To prove to them that they were worth changing for. To become what I needed and never had. Buying my first set of weights in early 2025, I decided to finally try out my luck at building a body I could feel proud of and by the end of the year, I’d shed 58lbs of fat and could finally do ten push-ups. Once I had my footing with a good exercise regimen, proper nutrition seemed to just fall into place. And then, like the snowball effect, emotional healing sort of…found me. Suddenly, I started to find more value in fulfillment than in material objects and finally started chasing after a truly rich and authentic life. This wasn’t some fun process, but then again, that’s not what this story is about. Just getting here was remarkable, especially when I had once thought I wasn’t even worth getting off the couch, feeling pretty or being safe. Now, I don’t believe in coincidences, and I won’t ever live in the tropics again, not after the two major hurricanes that changed the trajectory of my entire life. But in some filthy sort of irony, Ian destroyed the faulty family foundation and Helene destroyed everything else. It was almost like life slapped me in the face and said: “do you get it yet? It’s time to start over. Like, actually do it.” In the end, what I learned is that fat might make it easier to float, but I’m not interested in some easy life. I’m more interested in learning how to swim, how to navigate the tides inside myself and how to keep strong when others around me are drowning. I’m more interested in becoming what wasn’t offered to me when I was sinking and needed it the most. I’m more interested in becoming strong than I am in becoming buoyant and I know which one will get me farther in the end, too. I don’t plan on floating through life, I plan on swimming. How about you? |
SHANE GREENE is a lesbian poet and writer originally from Southwest Florida. When she's not spending time outdoors, she's likely at the local coffee shop or thrifting for more books. She has a nonfiction piece published in redrosethorns journal and another upcoming in PLAYBUTCH.
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