I'm a chronic worrier. What's worse, I'm a chronic worrier with an imagination. Now, in the middle trimester of my third pregnancy, those fanciful worries creep ever more deeply into my dreams. I find myself wakened from sleep with unsettling dreams and notions. I sometimes drift into a doze only to be startled from it by some worry, however unlikely, and while I'm aware that nothing bad is actually happening, I'm also aware that I'm not awake enough and not capable enough to stop it from happening. Strangely enough, the latter realization unsettles me more than the former calms me. And of course, at the center of each of these not-quite-nightmares, are my children.
I shake myself from these half-awake-mares, usually to the early light of the morning, or sometimes to the late evening darkness and the realization that I have fallen asleep on the couch again. I rouse myself just enough to ramble a perhaps nonsensical prayer, either from my knees or as I stumble to the kitchen to make breakfast. What does one say when taking these sorts of things to God? 'Please don't let my toddler escape into the street at any point today'? 'Please keep my kids from falling into the river that we never go near'? Not all of my worries are quite that irrational, but the point is that there are plenty of them, some ridiculously specific and others impossibly vague. Usually, my entreaty ends up being something along the lines of 'protect them, please, because I know I cannot. Not on my own.' And with that, I push most of those worries to the back of my mind and move on with my day. Other, more mundane worries quickly replace them, and I spend the next twelve hours mostly forgetting to be grateful that the heaviest thing on my mind is how on earth to get potty training behind us once and for all.
A couple weeks ago, I started a day that way, with the heavy realization of our mortality, a plea for protection, and then transitioned to what to have for breakfast. The hours passed and I mostly forgot the haunted dreams that had welcomed me to my morning. After the girls were in bed and Ben and I were ready to settle in for the night, an alarm began to sound in our back hallway, where the girls slept.
A week earlier, I had detected a funny smell in the back bedroom after bathing and dressing my girls - like nail polish, but accompanied by a vague scent of burning. I'd called the fire department but by the time they arrived to scan for gas and carbon monoxide, the smell had diminished and the air was free of any worrisome particles. "Do you have a carbon monoxide monitor?" the fireman had asked me. I said I did, indicating the one mounted in the hallway. "No, no," he said, "that's just a smoke detector." So, feeling like a complete idiot, I had added one to my grocery cart the next day.
When I heard the high pitched alarm, days later, I assumed it was just Ben installing the new one. I came out of the bedroom, to find it still in its packaging, though, untouched. The back door was open and Ben, perplexed, reported the same smell I'd noticed the previous week. It was stronger this time, but there wasn't any smoke and the alarm sounded differently than it did when something on the stove top or in the oven went badly awry.
With the back door open, the alarms grew farther and farther between, but we decided to call the fire department just the same. They showed up and began to scan again. Two to three parts per million in the hallway - noteworthy, but not quite dangerous yet. The fireman opened the door behind which our girls were sleeping and leaned in, only to back out again a moment later. "About fifty in there," he reported, and asked us to bring the kids out.
In our living room, two lady firefighters examined our girls with a pulse-oximeter, specially designed to pick up carbon monoxide levels in the blood. Addie's read 12%, hanging at the low end of dangerous, and Ellie's was up to 17%.
After a trip to the local emergency room for further examination and monitoring, and the challenge of settling two now-rambunctious children into a hotel room, hours later, my buzzing mind slowed into sleepy reflection, just before drifting off altogether. My kids had been in danger that night. They had been threatened by something I could not see, hear, or smell. The only sign had been an accompanying scent that I had, days before, been given reason to disregard as harmless, if not imagined. The only alert to its presence had come from an alarm which I had been told by a professional was not designed to detect it.
And I had woken that morning with a rambling prayer that my children would not fall victim to some danger from which I was powerless to save them.
I have little doubt that God has a sense of humor. Without the bawdiness or coarse irony that we often use to induce laughter, I felt that I could sense a bit of a heavenly chuckle in the whole event. A patient whisper of 'Yes, calm down, silly girl. These are my babies too, and I forget not my own.'
Since then, a verse of scripture that I used to love has reappeared in my mind and though I don't completely understand it in the context of this experience, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that the two are profoundly connected. "And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord," it reads, "and great shall be the peace of thy children." Yes, life is uncertain. The world is dangerous - but it is not spinning out of control, simply because it is out of my control.
My mother-in-law asked me, a few days ago, whether I have had moments of panic since this incident. I ran over the last couple of weeks in my mind, probably with a perplexed frown across my face, and to my surprise, answered, "No." But it's true. Even with all the day-to-day stresses, the mom-fail moments and endless tiredness that seems to plague all of us, I feel like I've regained a quiet peace that I had once and lost along the way - lost about that time I began to have people in my life, under my care, whom I could neither perfectly protect, nor stand to lose.
Reawakened is my sense that a Heavenly Father sent these children to me knowing that I might, from time to time, fasten the car seats improperly or cut the hot dogs into dangerously large pieces, or even, while taking an evening shower, cause the water heater to spew poison gas into their bedroom. He sent them to me knowing that the world is bigger, cleverer, and more powerful than I am. I am neither condemned by these human weaknesses and neither are my children abandoned to my care. They are His still. He watches over them still.
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