I was editing the podcast when the first earthquake happened. Meagan and I had just finished up an Independence Day recording session (#summerworkingmomlife). I thought the dog had jumped up and landed on the bed where I was sitting, but when I looked up from my computer he was lying still, staring back at me (he probably though I’d rocked the bed!). From where I live near the coast in Orange County, about 170 miles south of Ridgecrest, CA, where the 6.4M quake originated, it was just a hint of a tremor, about what you feel when a big truck lumbers by your house.

Bryan had the kids at a 4th of July carnival and they didn’t feel it at all. After obsessively refreshing the Los Angeles Times Twitter feed for about an hour, I was able to ditch the earthquake-related jitters and get back to celebrating the 4th. We even watched fireworks from Bryan’s office on the 10th floor of a building in Newport Beach and I didn’t give our venue choice a passing thought.

When the 7.1M struck the same region around 8:20 Friday evening, Bryan and I were on the couch watching The West Wing (we’re re-watching the whole series). The older two kids were in their rooms, awake and reading; Violet was already asleep. When the rolling tremors stopped we went upstairs to talk to the kids. They knew what had happened, seemed more surprised than anxious, and didn’t appear fazed.

After the second, larger quake I had a much harder time moving through the stages of comprehension and anxiety–the ones that start with “Holy Cow, the EARTH is moving” and move on through “Wow, that was an earthquake” and “Whoa, what if that had been bigger? Would we have been prepared?”, finally landing on “Okay, we’re safe, it was centered pretty far from here, and everyone’s okay.” Instead of progressing through these mental states like I had the previous morning, on Friday night I got stuck. Stuck refreshing Twitter. Stuck clicking on sensational headlines. And stuck in the What if stage.

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