Page 28 of Single Mom's Firefighter SEALs
“Like what?”
I focus on the table between us. “Counting things. Naming objects in the room. Cold water on his hands. Focused breathing, if he’ll do it.”
“Grounding,” she says. When I meet her eyes, she nods slightly. “That’s what Tyler used to need when he came home wound tight after training or deployment. He wouldn’t always say much, but there were things he did. Routines.”
There it is. The man who’s been here in the room with us, whether shementions him or not.
“What kinds of things?” I ask.
“He liked structure.” A faint smile crosses her face, then fades. “Lists and order helped. Physical tasks. He’d reorganize the garage, clean tools that were already clean, go for runs after dark, check locks twice.” She looks down at her hands. “Sometimes three times.”
I know that life too well.
“When T.J. has a bad night, I find myself doing the same things with him, giving him concrete details, telling him what day it is, where he is, what’s going to happen in the morning.”
“That’s good.”
She looks back up at me. “It’s best when I stay calm.”
I almost say that’s true of everything, but instead, I say, “Kids probably read tone before they understand words.”
Her eyes stay on mine. “Adults do, too.”
She says it softly, and it still hits the mark.
For a second, I consider changing the subject back to the school and pretending the alarm didn’t bother me. Pretending nothing bothers me. But then I’d be lying in answer to a question this woman is too kind to ask.
“I knew the fire alarm was coming, and it still unhinged me.”
“I thought it did,” she says gently.
I trace invisible patterns on the table with my finger. “Sometimes my body reactsbefore my head does. It hasn’t happened much for a while, but I had a bad reaction on a house fire call a few days ago.”
Her expression doesn’t change. There’s no pity or sympathy there, only a calm understanding.
“It used to be worse … before.” I don’t know why I keep talking. Maybe because she isn’t pushing, and like Buck and Weston, she’s someone who understands, at least to some extent.
“What helps you … when you notice it happening?”
No one’s ever asked about it that way. Not are you okay or why do you think it happens. Not do you want to talk about it.What helps.
I run my thumb over an old scar on the side of my index finger. “Movement, structure, focusing on specific tasks, and knowing what comes next.”
“Similar to your advice for T.J,” she says. “I’ll give those a try for his nightmares.”
“Buck ran drills with me after that call. He used the trigger words over and over, so I could keep moving through it.”
Her brows draw together. “That sounds brutal.”
“It was useful.”
“Yeah? It helped?”
I shrug. “Enough that I kept going.”
“That’s good.” She gives me a small smile. “Tyler used to say progress doesn’t always look the way people want it to.”
I’m silent for a moment because the words hit hard in a couple of different ways. “I don’t like needing the adjustment,” I say eventually.
