Tammi
Hartung | Out of the Ashes
Once upon a night...
Not so long ago, and in a land not so very far away, a mother frantically pulled first one child from the bottom bunk. All the while she was screaming out her older child’s name trying to alert that child to the danger licking over the windows in the bedrooms and living room. Split second rationalization allowed the desperate mother to leave her youngest child on the landing and re-enter the burning apartment still screaming her daughter’s name. She added the alert “Fire” to warn the rest of the building of the dangers now threatening them all. Halfway to the bedroom she almost lost her strength to stand as she saw her sleepy-eyed daughter emerge from the burning room. It was at that moment that she realized that she had been praying the whole time; “Please, God…” not able to finish the rest of that sentence until she saw her daughter safely join her son on the landing. “Please, God, don’t let me lose her to the fire!”
That frantic, desperate, praying mother is me.
The children are my daughter and my son.
We survived.
Nothing else did.
We were immediately thrust into a survival mode as I now faced an
enormous burden of finding a new home for me and my kids which
was made all the
more challenging since I had been a stay-at-home mom for 10 years.
I had no job or training that would get me a job. I had no financial
security because
I was
in the middle of a divorce and there was no established support to
list on a renter’s application. I did have insurance but,
because of the divorce, it would be years before that money would
be of any
help to me
and my kids.
During our recovery, my mother kept referring to the Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs in order to bring me some assurance that I was handling
our loss appropriately. I have become interested in the study that Maslow
has put
together. He has created a pyramid to illustrate the hierarchy
associated with meeting these needs. According to Maslow, the most pressing
needs
are called deficiency (or prepotent) needs and they must be met
first before growth and maturity can take place in an individual. As
you may
imagine,
because
of
the fire, my family now faced many deficiency needs, placing us
at the base of Maslow’s pyramid.
Copyright© 2004
Tammi Hartung
last modified: April 2004 | contact
me