We live in one of the safest places on earth. We’re really lucky. He said, “So our house — nothing’s ever happened here?” I said, “No.” Our town, nothing’s ever happened here. My grandparents are from southeastern Virginia, and they would always tease my parents about their hillbilly daughter, because I never had shoes on. We would take long walks around campus, especially in the summertimes. It was kind of my playground. I don’t even know what time I got to work, but I feel like it was after — just after — 8. It was very, very windy. Very gray, very cold. Starts out with maybe like one, and then like, boom, boom, two. And then it jumps into sort of a crescendo of this waterfall of explosions. And intense and amplified confusion, where your heart feels like it’s beating on the inside of your skin. It’s something you can’t crawl out from underneath. If safety exists on a spectrum, there’s a certain portion of that spectrum that was totally violated and changed and turned on its head. I definitely have never told any of my children about what happened at Virginia Tech. I didn’t know how to talk about it. I still don’t really talk about it all that well. My son is a boy who quite literally has a light inside of him. It comes out of his skin, his eyes, his hair. He absorbs all of what the world has to offer. But after Parkland happened, there was a visible, visceral shift in him. He all of a sudden couldn’t be in public places. “No, Mommy, we can’t stay. We can’t stay here. We have got to go.” When I finally got him to talk about it, he talked about place. “Well, it happened in Florida, Mommy. Florida is so far away from here.” His nightmares were all about this monster in his head that he named Socks. He told me what Socks’ voice sounded like, and he told me what Socks smelled like. We talked about Socks’ family. He said Socks didn’t have a family. And so we talked about how, you know, Socks might just be lonely. The things that we fear tend to be more a fear of the unknown than it is a fear of what’s real. I wonder if this is something I’ve somehow passed down to him, this fear and anxiety he was kind of born into. And when he’s standing a little taller, scanning the perimeters, I wonder if it’s something he’s ever going to be able to let go of. Or if it’s something he’ll just have to learn to navigate. I remember when he first fell off his bike, there’s this idea that I’ve taken care of it. It will get better. I’ve got you. You’re safe. But these giant big fears, these confrontations with the world, I can’t fix. How do you calm your child’s fears about the bogeyman, when the bogeyman is real?