Wednesday

It was one of those moments when I really feel my mommyhood.

Minutes earlier, Ellie had come creeping up the stairs with a look that plainly said, “I feel like I’m going to throw up but I want to keep playing with my friends because I made them a Harry Potter scavenger hunt and it’s going to be so fun but I really do feel like throwing up and I’m going to cry because throwing up is my very worst thing.” Her actual voice might have supplied a few of those details, but the look in her eye told me the rest.

I sent her to bed with the trusty barf bucket and headed downstairs to disappoint two bright and bubbly third-graders. No sooner had I shown them the door than the summons rang from Ellie’s room. I held her hair and rubbed her back as she cried and gasped and purged her very soul, it seemed, into the old black bucket. And now, as I helped her into pajamas and tucked her in between cool sheets, momentary relief showing on her sweet and clammy face, it struck me once again.

Look at me. I’m such a mom.

Moved by my newly stirred feelings of maternal benevolence, I walked into the kitchen with the thought of conjuring up some dinner for the rest of my brood. But such a vision was shattered by the sudden scream of smoke alarms throughout the house. What? Was I already cooking something? Clara came clattering down the hall with her hands over her ears and her hair in her face, Ellie moaned from her bed, and Jacob and friends crowded around to peer in the back door. I took a quick inventory of the house. No flames, no smoke, no forgotten grilled cheese sandwich scorching on the stove.

I ran from room to room with my step stool, yanking out batteries and trying to disable the alarms. Still they pealed. Ellie crawled out of bed and slumped outside to dutifully sit on the driveway in her jammies. Clara ran rampant through the house. Jacob and friends shouted theories from the backyard: “I bet the flames are inside the walls!” “Maybe it’s a really tiny fire!” “Maybe the house will explode!” My disabling efforts were in vain. Neighborhood dogs ramped up their barking.

I tried all two of the non-emergency fire department phone numbers I could find. No answer. Heads were poking out of doors up and down the street. Ellie’s pale face was pleading with me to make it all stop. My neighbor hollered that I should call 911. I didn’t want to. They hate me at 911! (What about that time two-year-old Clara secretly dialed them repeatedly and brought two cops to our door on a Sunday afternoon? What about that time our carbon monoxide detector went off and caused a frenzy for no reason anyone could find?) I hate calling 911, and this was not an emergency.

And yet it began to feel like one. The unbearable screeching went on and on. Ellie was about to vomit in our yard in front of all the neighbors. So I sighed, called 911, and sheepishly recited my address.

Despite my insistence that this was not a big deal, truck after truck after police car after fire engine (two of them!) pulled up to my house. Man after official-looking man poured through my front door.  From my porch I surveyed the scene on the street, and I caught my breath at the thought of what would happen to Jeremy’s heart if he happened to come home from work right then.

A fleet of flashing emergency vehicles, sidewalks filled with onlookers, the unsettling sound of sirens. And us in the center of it.

I’m thankful for throw-up afternoons and slightly fevered little brows. I’m thankful for a yard full of light sabers and six-year-old war whoops. I’m thankful for tiny clomping feet and perpetually tangled hair. For the calm of my everyday chaos.

(Oh, and by the way. You’re supposed to replace all your smoke alarms every ten years, not every eleven and a half. Surprised you didn’t know that.)