My youngest daughter, Paige, has been having some anxiety lately.
It happens most often in the car or at bedtime.
It happened on her way to Lake Tahoe with her best friends a few weeks ago.
She called me from a mountainside four hours away, in a panic.
Because she has been firing real close to the edge, I have been carrying a bottle of herbal Rescue Remedy Drops with us. They seem to take the edge off.
This weekend, she, my husband, and I took a road trip to join her team at a soccer tournament. We were nearly to our destination when she called up to me that she was feeling anxious.
I gave her the drops and a pep talk about how close we were, how much fun the weekend would be, and told her that I actually needed to use the restroom, so we would be pulling off in just a second, and she could get out of the car and have some fresh air for a minute.
We had just pulled off the freeway and onto an off-ramp, stopping as the front car in the second lane from the left, waiting at a light to turn left into a shopping complex.
She had just finished saying, “I’m starting to feel much better now,”
when my husband looked up into the rear-view mirror, and I saw his eyes widen.
If a movie were made from this story, this scene’s soundtrack would be a record scratching, because at that exact minute,
just as her nerves were calming,
we would find out how very-much-too-soon she had spoken.
“Is this a HIGH-SPEED PURSUIT?!” My husband gasped, still staring in his mirror.
I couldn’t even tell what he meant yet.
The sirens hadn’t even caught up to my eardrums.
They did right then, though, and I realized that what he was watching was a car flying up directly on our tail, sandwiched by police cars on every side.
My husband winced, thinking they were about to plow into us.
Right at that moment, one cop car screeched around and flew into a “T,” that was fully sideways, blocking our car in the line.
Now, we couldn’t turn if we wanted to.
Police everywhere.
Smoke from the police cruiser’s tires rose.
We could smell burning rubber.
We sat in shock as an officer then jumped out and pulled out his weapon.
He was right at our hood, holding it facing us.
My husband, Justin, yelled, “Get down! Get down!” back to Paige in the back seat.
Now he was lying over, basically in my lap, and she was flying into the floorboard, as I continued sitting, stunned, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
Paige was in the floorboard for all of two seconds when she popped back up like a Jack-in-the-Box, and hollered that she had dove so fast she had given herself a thigh cramp.
It was 30 seconds of absolute chaos before the car that had been pursued suddenly veered its wheel hard to the right and drove over the median to escape again down the side road,
sending at least 10 cop cars fleeing after it.
Slowly, we sat back up and waited for the light to change.
We turned left into the complex, as we had originally intended.
None of us could believe what had just happened.
We were in a bit of a daze as we pulled into a fast food restaurant and walked inside so I could use the bathroom and we could catch our breath a bit.
We thought that was the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
Ten minutes after walking inside the restaurant and ordering drinks, we stood near the front doorway when in walked a man that looked like some kind of cartoon character.
Roughly 5 feet tall, coke-bottle glasses, hair like a Samurai. His eyes were squinting.
He sort of waddled weirdly, like he was stunned.
It was the walk of a person who is emotionally reeling.
But, all of this wasn’t the most noticeable thing.
It was the fact that he was wildly smacking and chewing an absolutely huge mouthful.
He noticed us looking over at him and turned his body to face us, then kind of groaned out something completely unintelligible.
All of us later confirmed that we had all thought he perhaps had special needs, and thought maybe he needed help or something, so we had leaned closer, only to then watch him take a huge gulp of what was in his mouth, and then say much more clearly,
“Man! That was crazy! I just had a cop jump out of his car and aim a gun at me!
I was just sitting there, and he jumped out and was aiming it! I was yelling, ‘I’m just picking up for DoorDash! See? I’m going to pick up chicken! I’M JUST GRABBING CHICKEN!”
We told him that we had been there, too. This funny little man looked relieved and said he wondered if anyone would even believe him.
“When they finally let us go, I was so stunned,” he said, “I drove over to Panera and told the people there. They all felt so bad for me as I was talking about it; They pretty much shoved bread in my mouth and told me I deserved it.”
What he had been chewing was EMOTIONAL SUPPORT BREAD.
They had literally shoved it in his mouth like a pacifier, and he had just proceed to the next restaurant.
We left that restaurant laughing, and no longer shaken up; Just in shock at this whirlwind of a story.
A random exit had turned into an absolute whirlwind of a story.
When we got back in the car and headed back on our way, Paige laughed and said,
“Well, the good news is I no longer feel anxious.”
I guess the key is to just drive whatever anxiety you have to level 10, and everything will start to feel downhill from there.
“See, Honey? I told you you’d be OK! All it took was chaos, a police chase, and an empathetic crew at Panera!”
The weekend was pretty uneventful after that.
Also: Tip your DoorDash workers a little extra this week.
You never know what they’ve been through to get your chicken.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
