Today we were leaving the house and had to bring the dog with us. Bennett was in charge of getting her in the "trunk". With the type of suv/car we have, it's more like a 3rd row seat instead of a trunk. He had to open the hatchback (which is quite tall), which opens up toward the ceiling, inside the garage. He was trying to get her in there, when he decides it might be better to open the garage door so she has more room to jump up. It's a rather tight fit inside our garage. So, he goes to open the garage door and all of the sudden we hear this metal creaking noise. Not good.
You know the sound metal makes when it is being crumpled? Ya...that was the noise. Have I ever mentioned how well I do in crisis situations? Never. Exactly - there's a reason for that. I don't do crisis situations. I'm probably one of the worst panic-ers in the world.
I hear the dreaded noise. My heart stops. I race from inside the house out to the garage where I behold the garage door and my trunk door in a fight to the death. The trunk door has halted the garage door's steep climb to the top. Oh crap! That was literally my first response.
Now things start to get interesting. Bennett has melted in utter tears over his fateful mistake and seeing his mother looking clueless as to how to fix it. Gavin is standing at the entry to the garage with an awestruck (not the good kind) look permanently affixed to his face. He handles panic situations even worse than I do - he freezes up. So, I get the only other coherent person (Chloe - who is asking a ton of questions about what is going on - "Mommy doesn't have time to answer you right now Honey, I'm in panic mode.") to grab the dog who is literally shaking out of control. She somehow thinks she caused this whole ruckus.
At the same time....the phone rings. Why on earth I even answered it, I have no clue...must be a habit. Anyways, it was Chuck calling about something no where near as important as my current situation. I have no clue about what he said because I was too busy yelling into the phone, "Right now is not a good time for me to talk, Baby, because I'm in kinda in the middle of a little crisis situation here." You know how your voice gets a little high pitched and shaky in these small moments of stress. Chuck could hear by the sound of my voice that I was indeed in the middle of my own personal, small meltdown. The only thing I heard on the other end of the line was, "Do I need to come home?"
"No. It's no big deal, the garage door and the trunk door are stuck together and I can't pull them apart and we're in the middle of trying to sell our house and we don't need another major expense, such as a new garage door right now. I'm just trying to pry the trunk door out from the grasp of the garage. No problem-I can do this." He didn't have the benefit of seeing my tongue-in-cheek.
"Okay then. Call me back." Oh the pins and needles he must have sat on for the duration of the time it took me to call him back.
Seems like all my motivational thinking was working. I suddenly had the idea to move the car forward (farther into the garage - but not thru the wall) to 'untie' the two pieces of metal. Actually, I have to give credit to where credit is due. I can't think in panic situations. So, obviously, it was God dropping a miraculous tid-bit of clear thinking/reasoning abilities into my numb brain in order to enable it to work in the fashion he created it for for just this sort of situation.
Voila. It worked. The garage door continued its trek northward without any more obstacles and the trunk door was free to stay attached to the car once again. The collision noise I mentioned earlier appeared to sound worse than it actually looked. There was barely a dent in the garage door and the trunk door had the tiniest of scratch marks. No harm. No foul. My worse-case-scenario mind made a mountain out of a mole-hill yet again.
The rest of the day was spent with Bennett and I apologizing to each other. He kept telling me how sorry he was. I kept telling him how sorry I was. The funny thing was though, we were both apologizing for the same thing: panicking. I guess I know who got my gene.
