When my second son was 2 weeks old, he woke up at twilight, as hot as a tamale. It was August, and we were an hour outside the city. Shaking, I called our pediatrician and asked if I should take the baby to the local hospital nearby or race into the city.

“A 2-week-old with 104 degree fever?” she asked me. “Just get him to the closest hospital.”

I slammed down the phone, stuck the baby in the car, and raced off. This cannot be happening, I remember thinking. This just cannot be happening. The responsibility of this baby felt so enormous and so squarely placed upon my shoulders.

It wasn’t until I was pacing back and forth across the emergency room that I realized I’d been living in a fool’s paradise. Having only braved an ear infection and a nasty stomach bug with my first child, I wasn’t even remotely aware of just how lucky I had been up until that point.

Nothing could have prepared me for the spinal tap and poking and blood-drawing that went on when I got this child to the hospital. Or for the hours of waiting for information, the despair upon hearing that an E. coli infection had been discovered, the sense of uncertainty when the location of the infection, his kidneys, was isolated, and again, the desperation when the doctors said the infection had spread to his bloodstream. All of which was followed by a vast sense of relief when he began to respond to a powerful intravenous drug.

When I left the hospital, 10 days after entering it, I was a different person. There was an innocence about me that had vanished. I was conscious of the change, and ambivalent about the loss.

Weeks and months later, I felt my old lightness return to me – but never quite to the extent that I had felt before that drive to the emergency room. It was as if I had walked to the edge of a black hole and peered in. I didn’t need to fall inside to have my very core shaken. It was enough just to get that close to the edge.

There are some days when raising a bunch of children seems like a piece of cake. You get them dressed and fed and wash their faces. You do the drop-offs and pick-ups and the after-school schlepping. You have a decent conversation with your oldest and manage to connect and get some information out of him. You cheer at the matches, oversee the homework.

But then there are those other moments, set off unexpectedly. Sometimes they occur when my whole family is in the car together, or often at the end of a day when the kids are all in their pajamas, playing.

At moments like these, I realize just how fragile a setup this is, this parenting thing, and that when you’re a parent, your heart is actually walking around in other people’s bodies – bodies you can’t always control. Bodies that don’t belong to you.

I often remind myself that this vulnerability is part of it all, and that while acknowledging it is a blessing, focusing on it is not. If I focus too much on the fragility of parenting, I will miss out on the rest: the comical side of raising children, the delight that comes from reliving new experiences with them, and the uproariously funny things that children say and do.

Last week I had one of those moments. One of my boys is obsessed with candy. From the moment his eyes open each morning, Josh dreams of which sweet he’ll be able to choose from the candy store across the street from his school later that afternoon.

And his taste in drinks is hardly different. While his siblings drink water and milk, he loves lemonade and juice, the sweeter the better. He’s a dentist’s dream.

And so it wasn’t the biggest surprise when, after he and his brother had brushed their teeth and were about to go to bed, I found Josh snooping in the kitchen, gulping down the last few sips of pink lemonade that were still sitting in a glass by the sink.

Exhausted and irritated, I told him he had exactly two minutes to run to my bathroom and brush his teeth again. Off he trotted and a minute later he returned, ready to choose a book to read and go to bed.

By the time I was ready to go to bed myself, I had forgotten about the last-minute double brushing that had occurred earlier in the evening. But when I went to brush my teeth, I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or call the poison control center.

There, sitting next to Josh’s toothbrush, was for sure a small tube of paste. But instead of the travel-size Colgate that Josh thought he was using, he had, in fact, brushed his teeth with Lotrimin, the anti-fungal medicine that my husband was using to cure a pesky case of athlete’s foot.

Josh was breathing just fine. And knowing him, he’d probably only brushed for about 15 seconds flat. Who needed the poison control center? I called my husband and we had a good laugh.

I couldn’t forget the feeling I’d had on the way to the emergency room if I tried. But it’s important to try to remember these other moments, too. They are lighter and sillier, but may be just as important.