Exactly one week after the terrorist attack on the United States, a co-worker asked how my son was doing in the wake of the week's tragic events. For the first time I realized how well my son was doing and how well, because of him, I was doing. This is not to say that I hadn't cried, that I hadn't felt hopelessly afraid and desperately furious at times. But I was dealing well with the shock and pain of events so tragic and with repercussions so vast because of my child.

On that fateful Tuesday my office shut down and I rushed to my son's school alongside many worried parents. There are moments when time can almost stop. You get stuck in a thought or a feeling and choose not to eat or sleep, but just let your mind wander through the ever changing and unending pieces of the world. This can be frightening. As can losing track of the parts of our daily routines that make our individual worlds go round. As I listen to my co-workers, to friends, to people on the radio, many of them seem to be lost in this no-time land. Their days are made up of news coverage, special reports, little eating and less sleep. It is as if the larger world has swallowed up their own and sucked the life right out of them.

A child, however, will pull you back to the reality of lost shoes, band aids, underwear jokes, and snacks. And if you are responsible for a child, you can't let the world get much bigger than that. The world is the house, the park, the school, the store, the church, and friends and family. The world is wake up, choose what cereal you want to eat, go to school, Momma meets you at the bus, and read a story and sing a song at bedtime. Thus far in my 5 year old's existence there is nothing that loves from his father and I can't assuage. This will change eventually, but for now this is a good thing. When my husband and I watched some of the news coverage of the terrorist attack and talked with him about it, it was because even though those images cut the world open for me, for him, with his parents framing and explaining what he saw that day, the world was still contained in the simple idea that sometimes people choose to do very mean things and we don't know why, but in our family we don't choose to do mean things and we are safe and we love each other.

Some people will undoubtedly feel that I am fooling my child or myself or both of us. I certainly felt the same way 12 years ago when my aunt carefully circumnavigated a question from her young daughter about a child who had been brutally murdered. Why would you keep the truth from her, I wondered self-righteously. But it now seems far more likely that the truth is that a 5 year old doesn't need the truth a 12 year old, or a 17 year old, or a 25 year old does

At this point in time, the suffering is already great. And I am very concerned that if we do not let ourselves follow the children back to the world of small and simple things that the suffering will only increase. I am not naïve. I do not think the task ahead of our nation an easy one. But in this instance I think the guileless acknowledgement of my son that something terrible happened, a desire to help those who were hurt, and the # 1 rule of first grade which is Be Kind, are far more positive responses than the vindictive and irresponsible tossing around of words like "righteousness" and "war".

In every age, there is always some time of great suffering, but those who are loved and feel safe and secure in the world of their childhood will carry the larger world forward through those times with compassion, wisdom, courage, and hope. So it is that I am doing well, well enough, that is in the wake of so terrible events that when my son sees that I'm sad he can hug me and ask me why and I can tell him that sometimes very sad things happen. And feeling his tender hands on my face I can let him feel sad with me while in my sorrowing heart a sweetness swells due the goodness that is his world.