Super courage!

There's a reason parents on airplanes are urged to adjust their own oxygen masks before helping their children. Safety experts know how strong the parental instinct is to save one's child without regard to one's self.

That's surely the impulse that drove me to completely ignore my lifelong fear of bee stings and plunge into a hole absolutely swarming with bees. From across the yard I'd seen my daughter, Eleanor -- still wobbly as a newly minted toddler -- take a tumble. Jogging over to help her up, I saw the in-ground nest -- and the angry bees, on her clothes, tangled in her downy hair, even inside her howling mouth. They could have been butterflies for all I cared as I snatched her up and raced inside.

I didn't notice the welts all over my legs until hours later -- after the dash to the ER, where some 30 stingers were removed from my little girl, after I was assured she was okay.

During a child's emergency, everything in the world -- including regard for one's own fears, or safety, or life -- recedes. Selflessness may be an unhealthy way for a mom to live 24/7, but it clearly has a time and a place.

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