The narrator says that she owes her mother for her existence three times over. First, her mother saved her own life rather than go down with her first husband in a terrifying circus tent disaster that killed the husband. Instead of reaching for him as she fell, as she might have been tempted to do, she must have considered her own life as well as the life of the child inside her at the time (not the narrator, though), and she purposely did not reach for him.

The narrator says that she owes her existence, for the second time, to her mother and her father, to the doctor who treated her mother for the injuries she sustained in that accident, as well as to the hospital where they met.

Finally, when she was seven years-old, the narrator's house caught on fire. She was asleep when the fire started, and when she woke up, she "did exactly what was taught in the second-grade home fire drill." She checked her door, found it hot, stuffed a rug into the crack to keep the smoke out, and "sat down to wait" for help to arrive. The narrator says that she felt "terribly relieved" by the time her mother shimmied out onto the tree branch and leaped onto the house, climbing into her window. Then, as they fell gracefully into the firefighter's net below, she realized that what her mother always said was true, "As you fall there is time to think."

Thus, the fire presented a real learning opportunity for her, and it allowed her mother to save her life a third time!