BETWEEN MINIBIKE DUSTUPS, snake-and-spider invasions of our forts, and a few spectacular collisions (catching too close to the batter, not-quite-clearing-the-diving-board flips), my sisters and I were a tough crew.

Childhood spills and griefs, for us, felt less like catastrophes than healthy challenges met and mastered. If someone had asked me back then—as they did many years later when I was feeling afraid—what I was expecting in the face of those challenges, I probably would have said, "I'm expecting to dust off and get back in the adventure."

Misadventure did not fill us with fear. And I've always attributed that to my mother's calm. Though she only recently admitted to me her serious distaste for lizards—reptilian terrors that often occupied our pockets and jars—I marvel at how I never sensed a crack in her cool over our well-being, even during incidents that, today, I might consider scary.

A large part of her calm was probably because of her Christian Science upbringing, which had accustomed her to a spiritual response to fears of disease, physical harm, or personal problems. Fear—a compelling suggestion of something awry—may come unbidden into your thoughts, but your response to it is your choice. And my mother's choice was to counter irrational fear with the reasoning of what she considered the truth—that the "allness" of a good God precludes the "somethingness" of fear.

It wasn't as if she ministered over our every problem with a religious spiel. It was that her calm response was informed by a spiritual sense that made us confident everything was all right. And, inevitably, it was.

So that's the way I wanted to mother—sort of like the Survivor emcee—orchestrating the perfect bushwhacking childhood. But that was before tiny Ellen was delivered into my arms with her E.T. fingers, delicate skin, and intense infant eyes. My bold parenting philosophy started to melt under my heated imagination: "Minibikes? Forts in the forest? What was I thinking?"

Worries—unbidden, but surely abetted by a crude sense that Ellen's safety was all on my shoulders rather than in the allness of God—suddenly dominated the way I thought about my child. Everything from the great stomach-or-back sleep debate, to the merits of boiling baby bottles, to the issue of fluoridated vs. unfluoridated water in formula suddenly moved from the realm of the resolvable to life-or-death decisions in my muddled thought.

It was around Day 2 of life with Ellen that I poured out a serious of "What if" questions to a Christian Science nurse who came to teach me some of the practicalities of caring for an infant. Her Socratic response to almost every question was "What are you expecting?"

That question has become a motherhood mantra for me—a sort of spiritual retrieval system when I've seriously veered off course.

I won't deny that my answers to the question "What are you expecting?" were sometimes irrational—like, "I'm expecting a bird of prey to swoop down and steal Ellen. So we'll skip the sunbathing today." But even irrational answers can be revealing.

Answering the question always pulls me away from lazy thinking, in which my unconscious just meanders. Answering the question makes me think deeper for a moment. For me, that is prayer—when my heartfelt, conscious expectation is in charge. My expectation is that Ellen's childhood is rich and normal—that she's living large "in the adventure."

Here's a quote from Science and Health that inspires me: "The offspring of heavenly-minded parents inherit more intellect, better balanced minds, and sounder constitutions" (p. 61).

"What are you expecting?" helps me remember my "heavenly-mindedness."

What are you expecting?