When I was reading See Mom Run: Side-Splitting Essays from the World’s Most Harried Moms by Beth Feldman (and other amazing blogger/writers), I laughed out loud. I think I might have cried twice but I mostly laughed out loud. The laughing was mainly due to the way that I related to all of the stories in different ways.

I related really well to a story told by Meredith Jacobs of Modern Jewish Mom about how she locked her daughter in the car. She kept it a secret from her husband. I laughed so hard at this story that I nearly choked on my tears. Why?

I’ve locked my kid in the car. But I didn’t get to keep it a secret.

It was a warm June morning and I decided that I would take my lovely two year old son out to run some errands. We were home alone for a two week period as my husband was away with the Army attending a school for his recent promotion. I was twenty-some weeks pregnant with what we knew at that point to be our second son. Errands needed to be run in the early morning or I simply wasn’t going to get to them, what with the being alone, summer heat, pregnancy and a two year old.

So, off we went! I put my purse in the front seat. I put my son in his car seat and buckled him in tight, handing him a book to keep him happy on the drive. I shut the door. I walked around. I grabbed the handle and pulled only to find that the handle snapped right back, leaving the door shut.

And locked.

For a brief instant I thought that I simply had done it wrong because, in that moment before it all sunk in I figured that there are so many different ways to open a car door, right? I tried again. No dice. I walked as quickly as my pregnant behind would allow me to walk around the rear of the vehicle and tried the passenger side door. Double the no dice thing. I looked at the front seat and realized that my cell phone was sitting inside my purse. I glanced at the front of the house, knowing without checking that I had locked the front door.

Panic.

I ran to our neighbor’s house. Yes, I ran. Pregnant with complications, I still ran. She let me use her phone and I dialed the fire department.

Did I mention that my husband works for the fire department? Did I also mention that this would have been his shift day had he been working and not away with the Army? I didn’t? Well, all of that information is true. As such, I called the people that I was the absolute most familiar with at the fire department and sobbed into the phone, “I LOCKED HIM IN THE CAR!” They said they were coming.

I stood outside with my neighbor as we waited. My son was more patient then than he is now and, like Meredith’s daughter, he looked at me with a confused look on his face. “Why is Mommy outside the car? Get in Mommy, you goofball.” Things like that. He waved. He played with a book that I miraculously had given him before I locked him in the vehicle. At least I did something right.

Eventually, I heard the familiar sound of a fire truck start down our hill. I looked up. There came the bright, red fire engine… with its lights on. In it I saw my husband’s captain and another good firefighter friend. I was mortified as neighbors stuck their heads out of their front doors. My son craned his neck to see the fire truck. I wanted to hide under the car.

After a moment of discussion, it was decided that they would crawl in a window of my house and unlock the door so that I could retrieve the spare set of keys. This would ensure that nothing would break on the car in trying to unlock it. Sounds easy enough.

Great. People I know and that work with my husband, traipsing around in my house that I thought, “Oh, sure, we’ll run errands now and I’ll clean up this mess while my son is taking his afternoon nap.” I should have just said, “Sure, climb on in! Be sure to look at my dirty underwear in the bathroom when you walk through!” Mortified. Absolutely mortified.

The house was unlocked. I retrieved the spare keys. I opened the car door, unbuckled my son and pulled him into my arms. To which he yelled, “WOO WOO TRUCK!” He didn’t even know that he had been trapped in the car. I thanked my husband’s coworkers. They left. We got back in the car… without creating any lights and sirens drama… and went about our day.

Now here’s where my story differs from Meredith’s. While she was able to keep her story a secret, I couldn’t very well keep that a secret from my husband considering not only his fire department responded but his very shift. That said, I didn’t even get to keep it a secret from local friends and family. In the response call section of the newspaper the next day, the report stated that the fire department responded to a call at an address (which was ours) in which a child had been locked in the vehicle. It went on to say that the “boy looked unharmed and was happy to see the big red truck.”

What it neglected to say was that the mother looked pregnant, panicked and utterly mortified.

And that’s why I laughed so hard at the story and the others like it in See Mom Run. It’s so wonderful to learn that I’m not the only one flubbing my way through motherhood. I’m so glad to be able to laugh with these other moms at my foibles, flaws and sometimes fantastic moments.

(Some of you may remember this story from my original parenting blog. I rewrote it for this blog book tour because it needed to be on this blog, don’t you think?)

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[Disclaimer: I received a free copy of the book with intent of writing about it in this blog tour. Links are through Amazon Associates.]