In the summer of 2017, we were a middle-class family of three trying to get by, just like everyone else, in a world where Donald Trump was president, school shootings were made to seem normal, white nationalism was rife, and stories about sexual abuse by people in power were a daily occurrence.

Two things strike me: how naturally my daughter’s hand slips into mine, and that I might have walked by all of this without noticing it if I’d been on my own. That mural on the water tower of the face bubbling under water, was it always there?

            “Of course, Mama.  You just didn’t look up.”

More kids, more people, more brown people, more black people: in an us vs. them world, the conflict over space and money and traditions seems inescapable, so how do you teach tolerance? And in our case, how do we reconcile the instincts for neighborhood preservation with the need for expansion and change?

Tonight is my turn to read to Leila and by habit she will reject the first two stories I suggest, so I try to place the books I want to read in that third slot…. My favorite is a little-known book by Karen Hesse called, Come On, Rain! about some kids begging their mothers to let them put on their bathing suits and run out into a desert-quenching rain, and it rarely tricks its way into that third slot. Grasping at straws, I even try some reverse psychology, calling the book “too grown -up” in an attempt to goad her into wanting a big-girl story, and I have to laugh when it backfires with her yelling, “Then it’s not appropriate for children!”

My views of humanity, already Hobbesian when I think about the violation of innocent children, plummet even further at the thought of explaining how a nail can be hammered through flesh. For God’s sake, she’s five! At the moment even a visit from the tooth fairy is scary.

I’ve finished reading Bringing Up Bebe—that blockbuster memoir by an American mother raising her children in France the French way: breakfast at eight, lunch at noon, snack at four, dinner at eight. Nothing in between, no whining, no fighting—every one of them perfectly bred and able to bake a yogurt cake on a Sunday morning and wait till snack time to eat it. Yeah, right. The few mothers I know who read it said they’d given it a try and then laughed their socks off, but I was still determined to make a few of the ideas work.