Preface

 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. The institution for which I’d worked as a writer for 14 years had recently laid me off; New York City announced plans to completely overhaul our tiny Brooklyn neighborhood with 30-story housing developments; my mother-in-law-was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia (the disease that led Robin Williams to commit suicide); and my husband had finally come to see that since the wholesale winemaking business wasn’t a viable model, he would have to reinvent himself. It was also the year that our daughter, Leila, turned five and we learned to look at all of these issues through her eyes.

With an insect’s view from the grass , she was full of the boundless optimism that every blade, when bent, would bounce back, and all her sentences began with the phrase “At least….” At least Donald Trump doesn’t smoke and throw cigarettes on the ground. At least you lost a job and didn’t drop a baby. And when she was misbehaving, at least she hadn’t gone rock climbing while holding scissors or run away to the roof of our building to live. But the incongruity of her alternatives was at least as sad as it was funny, because in each was the knowledge of something she considered worse. And then one day she came home infuriated that we had told her 9/11 was a really, really bad fire and yelled at us, “You have to tell me the truth,” and we had to think long and hard about what we wanted her to know, when she should know it, and if it was wrong to lie to her in the meantime.

For us, the turmoil of that year coincided with Leila’s transition from childish naiveté to awareness, and as we negotiated the everyday family struggles you really can’t keep from a child, we became more conscious of the decisions we were making about whether to bring in the rest of the world’s problems. It’s a privileged position to be sure, and perhaps the easy answer is to name an age—let’s say nine—at which time a child should be handed that apple from the tree of knowledge and be exposed to everything. The trouble is, with the sources of information expanding exponentially, how do you make it to that point? In an age of helicopter parents and free-range parents and attachment parents and survival parents and intentional parents and authoritative parents and anti-technology parents—the list goes on and on—what kind of parents did we want and need to be? I don’t pretend to know the best way way to teach your children the difference between right and wrong, fill them with knowledge, and protect them until they’re old enough to fend for themselves; but every time I encounter parents asking themselves, “How are we supposed to raise a child in today’s world?” the one thing I know for sure is that we find comfort in learning that we’re confronting the same problems.

Here, then, is a year of our lives.