JUST WHEN I THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE

by Suzanne Lieurance



Just when I was finally beginning to believe my children were old enough to take care of themselves without me around most of the time, my younger son (he’s 14) planted new seeds of doubt in my mind when he volunteered to head a frozen pizza for dinner.

“Do you smell something, Mom?” he asked, quite innocently enough.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Something burning...smells like cardboard.”

“Uh-oh,” he said, with a sheepish look on his face as he raced to the stove and flung open the oven door.

“Tyler, you didn’t,” I said.

But it was quite apparent - he did!

He pulled the pizza out of the oven and placed it on top of the stove as I got a plate and handed it to him. He slid the pizza onto the plate, revealing a blackened circle of cardboard.

“You could have burned the house down!” I scolded, overreacting as I often do to any of his careless mishaps.

“How was I supposed to know the cardboard couldn’t go in the oven?” he offered in his own defense.

How was he supposed to know, indeed. We’ve probably only heated a thousand or so frozen pizzas from the time he was little. I just looked at him. Then I said, “Well, here’s a hint to always remember...never put cardboard in an oven...any kind of cardboard...any kind of oven.”

What could he say to that but, “Okay, okay. Geez, you always make such a big deal out of every little mistake.”

That made me start to wonder if he was right. Do I always make such a big deal out of every little screw up? Was cardboard in the oven just a little screw up? Sure it was, because we took it out. But if I hadn’t been there to recognize the smell, what would he have thought it was? Would he have looked in the oven? Or, would the cardboard have ignited and ruined the stove, or worse yet, actually burned the house down? I was deep in thought when my older son, who’s sixteen, came into the kitchen.

“What’s that smell?” he asked. “Smells like burning cardboard. Hey, I’ll bet Tyler left the pizza on the cardboard, didn’t he?”

“How’d you know?” I asked suspiciously.

“I did it once, too,” he said. “Almost burned the house down.”

I cut myself a slice of pizza and put it on a plate. “Just when I thought it was safe...” I mumbled.