Blue Sprinkles Taught Me How to Mother in a Hurricane

It's been seven months since we all survived Hurricane Helene—and I can't let go of these sprinkles.

There’s a container of nearly empty blue sprinkles sitting on the door of my pantry.

I see it every morning while assembling my toddler’s very specific breakfast: a yogurt pouch, fresh raspberries, a glass of water, a mini coffee cup of milk, a toasted veggie waffle, and whipped cream with rainbow sprinkles on top. Not the blue sprinkles. Only the rainbow ones.

The blue sprinkles sit untouched, gathering dust behind the condiments and crammed snack bags, their label faded from months of being ignored. There isn’t much left inside — maybe enough for one, maybe two, breakfasts at most.

Logically, I should throw them out. Make a little more room in our overflowing pantry where assembling a meal is a daily scramble and half the shelves are barely holding on.

But I can’t.

Because those blue sprinkles aren’t just pantry clutter. They’re a time capsule — a tangible reminder of one of the hardest, most defining weeks of my motherhood journey.

Seven months ago, life in Asheville forever changed. No one expects a hurricane to reach the mountains of North Carolina. We were supposed to be a “climate haven” — a place promised four distinct, beautiful seasons, tucked away from the worst disasters playing out on the news.

But Mother Nature doesn’t honor promises.

I was 31 weeks pregnant when the storm came in late September. Heavy with exhaustion and carrying the weight of the third trimester, I somehow slept through most of the hurricane’s force. But when I opened my eyes the next morning, the world had shifted. The power was gone. My phone had barely any signal. The silence was unnerving, and everything felt… off.

The towering trees in our backyard — the ones that had shaded our summers and turned our autumns into a postcard… were no longer standing guard. They were bent at unnatural angles, bowing and snapping like twigs. I stood frozen in my bathrobe, watching them thrash just inches from our windows, each sway threatening to shatter the glass. My heart pounded. “We need to go downstairs. Now,” I told my husband with conviction.

We huddled in the basement, lit some candles and tried to spin it into an adventure for our toddler. She clutched her little Lovevery flashlight like a magic wand, waving it through the dark as we read stories, sang songs… and waited for the rain to stop. We heard a loud thud every twenty minutes or so, and I closed my eyes, bracing for one of the trees to hit our home.

At first, it felt just like another inconvenience. Another power outage, like the dozens I’d weathered growing up in Appalachia where thunderstorms were frequent and fragile infrastructure was a fact of life. It felt like an unexpected day off from daycare and work. But then my phone buzzed — it was a text from my best friend, who lived just five minutes away: three trees had hit her house and she was scared. Without thinking, I turned to my husband and said, “You have to go get her. Bring her here.”

He tried to drive… but before he even got to the first ‘stop’ sign in our neighborhood, he realized there would be no driving. There were dozens of trees covering the road, blocking the path, making it impossible.

And so, he did what he had to: he hiked. He hiked through fallen trees and tangled power lines and poles, and across roads swallowed by debris. I sat awkwardly, heavily pregnant, on the floor outside our toddler’s bedroom as she napped, straining to hear any sound. With the baby monitor dead from the outage, I became the monitor: listening, waiting, willing myself to stay calm in the eerie and foreign silence of our home. My phone had lost service by then, and I didn’t have a way to reach my husband or my friend, so I had to just believe they’d return.

They did — and they were both muddy, breathless, and more sullen than I had ever seen them.

He told me it was worse than we thought. Far worse.

The next day, thanks to neighbors who cleared roads with the chainsaws they had at home, we drove around town, hoping for a signal and trying to piece together what had happened. We could reach no one. I didn’t know if my mom, who lived alone, was okay. I didn’t know what had happened to my friends or their homes. To our favorite restaurants, to our toddler’s daycare.

As we drove, we saw highway exits submerged under murky floodwaters. Playgrounds swallowed whole and turned inside out. We watched in horror as beloved businesses floated in the river. We saw rescue helicopters cutting circles into the otherwise perfect Carolina blue sky.

We realized it wasn’t just our little spot in South Asheville that had been impacted, it was all of Western North Carolina.

Everywhere we looked, there was destruction. It felt like the apocalypse.

At home, we rationed by cooking the thawing contents of our freezer on the propane grill. We even boiled water for coffee, clinging to the rituals that made the days feel less doomsday. My toddler survived on snack bars and yogurt pouches we somehow managed to preserve in a cooler with ice we somehow had in our freezer.

I tried not to eat too much, even though my body screamed with third-trimester hunger — because we didn’t know how long the groceries had to last. The grocery stores were closed since they didn’t have power either, making food unsafe to sell and credit card machines worthless. The gas stations that were open only accepted cash, but between the two of us, we had just $22.

When it became clear that recovery wasn’t a matter of days but of weeks or months, we made the decision to leave. Though we might have been able to tough it out and volunteer if it was just the two of us, it was the three of us — and really the four of us, with my swollen belly. A baby growing that was only a few weeks away from being full-term.

This decision, while carefully considered, was made quickly: we dropped our toddler off at our neighbor’s house for an hour, and we packed frantically: passports, some clothes, my prenatal vitamins, the food that hadn’t yet spoiled, dog food, stuffies for comfort, our laptops. We packed as much as we could, and we drove, holding our breath for two hours toward Charlotte, praying our gas tank would last and the roads would be open for us to pass through.

After staying with a beloved friend for a night, we found a dog-friendly Airbnb at the last minute that was fine but barely stocked, no coffee maker, three water glasses in total. We unloaded what little we had into the unfamiliar space, grateful to be somewhere with electricity and running water.

And then, immediately, we made a desperate Target and Whole Foods run.

We filled our cart with basics and not-so-basics: glasses, condiments, sticker books, crayons, Play-Doh, anything to make the place feel more like home. Anything to make it feel a little less like we were refugees from our own life.

Our cart was overflowing: $500 worth of survival, comfort and distraction. We were both so irritable and hungry, hanging on by a thread, in desperate need of a shower, but we kept going to keep some peace for our daughter.

As we stood in the checkout line at Whole Foods, exhausted and shell-shocked, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was forgetting something. I mentally scrolled through our needs: olive oil, yogurt pouches, bread…

And then it hit me. Sprinkles. Josefine would not eat her veggie waffles without sprinkles.

Running on fumes of adrenaline and love, I sprinted back through the aisles. I grabbed the first sprinkles I saw: blue ones. I figured I could tell her they were for Bluey, her favorite character.

Those blue sprinkles were our steady thread for weeks. Something I could do when I felt like I couldn’t do anything else but make alternative plans.

I found an OB/GYN in Charlotte, just in case I couldn’t deliver back in Asheville (the hospital at the time was advising pregnant patients to have back-up in another city). We looked into babysitters so we could work somewhat standard work hours, even while still paying full-time tuition for our closed daycare: to reserve our spot and help them stay afloat.

There was no timeline for anything, no certainty, no steady ground to stand on… but there were blue sprinkles.

They became my anchor in the unknown, a small but fierce reminder of my mothering instinct: when I couldn’t protect the four walls of my child’s home, when I couldn’t draw a map for how or when my second daughter would make her entrance into this world, I could still control one thing.

A breakfast with sprinkles. An act of resiliency and consistency when nothing else felt sure.

Eventually, ten very long days later when the electricity came back, we were able to return to Asheville. And while miraculously, our home had been spared, our town bore deep wounds: Twenty massive trees lost in our yard alone. Creeks rerouted, trails obliterated, businesses forever shuttered or transformed. My best friend’s roof still has a hole in it as she continues to fight with insurance.

For months after, we lived under a boil water advisory that was lifted just before my due date. I delivered our second daughter (with my doula and my OB/GYN) two days before Thanksgiving with bottled water by my hospital bed and pure gratitude laying on my chest. Up until a week earlier, it wasn’t guaranteed I could labor in water if I wanted to or take more than one postpartum shower.

We named her Maya, a name symbolizing magic, rebirth, strength, nature and deep emotion. We picked her name before the hurricane but it feels all too fitting now: she’s the easiest, happiest girl. The calm after the storm. The magic unfolding after nature’s wrath.

While it all worked out, it almost didn’t. And the PTSD lingers. Every heavy rain, every crack of thunder, pulls us back. We have a stockpile of emergency supplies now: not out of fear, but out of the new understanding that no place is invincible. The gas tank never nears empty. You know, just in case.

Months later, life has mostly stitched itself back together in the quiet, unseen ways survival demands. The days are busy again: packed lunches, formula prep, daycare drop-offs, nap schedules, bedtimes, deadlines, grocery runs. Normal, on the surface.

But every morning, in the gentle rhythm of our life rebuilt, I open the pantry door. The hinges creak the way they always have. The soft morning light spills in from the kitchen window, cutting across the clutter of cereal boxes and jars.

And there they are: the blue sprinkles.

I reach for the rainbow sprinkles, as I do every day — the ones my daughter insists on — but my eyes always catch first on the blue.

They sit quietly, battered but still upright. A flash of color from a darker time. A whisper from the mother I had to become when the world cracked open: the one who understood, in her bones, that protecting joy was just as sacred as keeping her children safe.

They offer me a rare chance to pause — to reflect, to heal, to finally acknowledge the reality we survived: a hurricane that upended our lives. We were displaced for weeks. I did it while very pregnant, with a toddler in tow.

As a mother, you don’t get the luxury of dwelling. You can’t wallow. Others depend on you: not to sit with the wreckage, but to carry them forward through it.

But the blue sprinkles are there to remind me that even when the skies split open and the ground gave way, even when there were no answers, no guarantees: my love for my girls never wavered.

I preserved their peace — and topped it with sprinkles for good measure.