I am accustomed to hearing the emergency alert siren in Madison on a regular basis; it happens on the first Wednesday of every month at noon precisely. When I hear the siren begin to wind up into its high-pitch sustained whine, I pause to consider the day and time to confirm that it is only a test. My response to this conclusion is typically a mix of relief (that the sound doesn’t indicate an impending disaster), and slight irritation (that this grating noise is interrupting my day, albeit for only a few minutes).

I am NOT accustomed to being woken from a deep sleep in the middle of the night to hear this emergency siren, as happened earlier this week. At approximately 12:30am on Monday night, I woke to the sound of the siren.   It took my sleepy brain a few moments to register what was happening.   The siren was accompanied by thunderclaps loud enough to send the dog slinking over with her tail between her legs, shaking, and heavy rain – not falling in it’s typical downward trajectory but instead blowing horizontally, thumping against the house – making my bedroom feel like the inside of a car wash. Was this a tornado warning?? My first reaction was to grapple in the darkness for my smart phone to check the radar and verify the cause of the siren (hoping that somehow my technology was smarter than the siren and would indicate that I could go back to sleep). But before I could locate any information, Ken walked into the room and announced the tornado warning.  He’d first heard about it on Facebook, which he’d just happened to be perusing after midnight while unable to sleep – confirming that the news still travels fastest via the smartest technology of all — social media.

A more youthful and childless version of myself – feeling invincible and relying on a belief that surely tornadoes didn’t touch down in the middle of the city – may have thrown a pillow over my head and gone back to sleep.  But the stakes are higher now, and any recklessness I may have felt in the face of danger has been replaced with fierce protective instincts to keep my family and myself safe. Despite these strong instincts, Ken and I did hedge for a few moments weighing the consequences of being swept away in a tornado against waking the baby. While we usually do everything within our power to keep the baby asleep, this seemed like an appropriate exception.

Fortunately Mattie barely stirred when Ken picked him up and minimal rocking and shushing noises kept him asleep for the tiptoed trip through the house and down two flights of stairs into our basement. We settled down to wait out the storm in a nest of blankets from the laundry pile near the washing machine; me rocking and nursing my sleeping boy and Ken watching the radar on his phone.

Even though I still thought the likelihood of the tornado affecting us was small (yes, some of that invincibility still lingers), I felt afraid and imagined a variety of potential grisly outcomes.   But I was also struck by the timeless quality of this scene in the basement (minus the smart phone), and it made me think about all of the other mothers that have huddled over their babies in the darkness while sirens wailed around them. I imagined the fear a mother might feel while under the threat of an air raid or some other kind of enemy attack. Or of the mothers who knew that a tsunami or an earthquake was coming, but had no safe place to take shelter with their babies.

Maybe this was a coping mechanism of my mind – to imagine another scene to take me out of my own. Whatever it was, it instilled feelings of kinship with these mothers to know, if only for a few moments, the fear of a real potentially life-threatening disaster.

Like any mother, I feel tiny flutters of fear for the life of my child on a daily basis; the kind of fear that causes my heart to feel like it has momentarily dropped into my stomach while at the same time I forget how to breathe. This is usually caused by a close call of one variety or another, like when he almost falls from the top of the slide on the playground, almost runs into the street when a car is coming, or almost slips and falls in the bathtub.  I sometimes joke that my day consists of protecting Mattie from one life-threatening event after another, but today I am grateful for the normalcy and relative smallness of these everyday events.

On Monday night, the siren stopped after a short time (10 minutes?) and we knew it was safe to go back to bed, which we did gratefully. The next morning, I read in the paper that the tornado did in fact touch down in the middle of the city, even snapping trees, damaging property, and felling power lines on streets walking distance from my own.   While my mind drifted to the fates of those less fortunate than myself, maybe the fear that I was experiencing (and simultaneously avoiding) was more real than I dared consider.

At noon on the first Wednesday of next month when the emergency warning siren blares, I expect to feel more relief and gratitude than irritation. And perhaps I’ll even think to use it as a moment of ceremony, to remember all of those other mothers who visited me in the basement on Monday night; those who were able to return to bed like me, relieved and grateful that the threat of danger had passed, and those whose lives were lost or forever changed by a siren in the night.