Some guy drove his car into my yard and knocked out my front porch this weekend. He was on drugs and completely incoherent and didn’t even realize where he was much less what he had done.  When the neighbors went to see if he was okay when the car finally stopped across the street, he was laughing! And drooling!

No one was hurt, not even the guy who did it. Thankfully our street was quiet at that moment and none of the kids who run around on our block were outside. Thankfully none of us were coming out of the house at that moment. Thankfully he didn’t hit our house and crash into our living room. Thankfully our cars weren’t parked in the driveway. There are a million thankfully’s that I can think of because the damage he did to the porch was so horrific that I don’t even want to think about what would’ve happened to a person.

We weren’t even home. Steve and I were in Madison shooting a theater show, so we had our phones on silent. The girls both had work that day and Brice was with his Dad. I assumed everyone was tucked away and safe. By the time Steve and I checked our phones that afternoon, we saw numerous missed calls from the girls and texts saying “Call me!”

I panicked. I assumed the worst, because I’m a mom and we do that. And because the girls don’t stalk me like that unless something is really wrong. I imagined something terrible happened: an accident or my mom and about a million other worst case scenarios. Then Steve got Georgia on the phone, who told him that our porch had been run into and collapsed. And you know what I thought? Thank God! That’s what I thought. It’s just a porch. Thank God! I took my ass back into the theater, still all shaky, to go finish shooting the show. I left Steve on the phone with Georgia to get details and I went back to work. I was honestly so relieved.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s also a pain in the ass. Georgia’s brand new bike was totaled. She rides that to work each day and was taking it to New York City for college. And my beautiful little garden that I planted with love when I was 9 months pregnant and that I have been tending for months was completely destroyed. There was a demolition crew here for the better part of the Sunday taking the porch off and cleaning up, closing up the holes on the front of the house. It doesn’t exactly look classy around here right now. And gawkers drive by 24/7 to see it. Cause we live in a small town, so as they keep telling me when they stop by, they all heard it on the scanner…

But we weren’t sitting out on the porch in that moment, like we so often do. The vehicles we desperately need to get to work and cart kids around weren’t in our driveway in that moment. And really, we’re moving into our new house in a couple weeks, and this one is just a rental. In terms of bad things happening, this is the best case scenario. And I have to think about it that way. I have to because If I gave myself even 20 seconds to think about the worst case scenario, I would build a brick wall around my house complete with a moat and none of us would never leave again. For real.

And the biggest thankfully I have? Other than that we were are all totally safe? I am not that guy who hit our house. I am not SO MESSED UP and out of control in my life that I could crash through a house on a quiet residential street and laugh because I’m so out of it. Can you imagine that life? I don’t want to think too much about that either. But I can still be so very thankful that it isn’t mine. That it may have skimmed the surface of our lives, but it doesn’t live here.