I sit and watch the news with my son. At his age, he needs to know what is going on in the world, but the continual litany of sorrow and fear that is now part of the very fabric of our daily lives is almost too much to bear. I wish for a moment that I could just flip off the television like I would when he was a little boy, and say, “Hey, let’s go to the park!”

I am surprised to find that in addition to all the other emotions brought on first by the terrorist attacks, and then by the war in the Middle East, I can now add parental guilt to the mix.

I feel guilty because my generation seems to have been looking the other way, and we let our children down. Or maybe we weren’t looking at all. We got blind-sided, sucker-punched in the worst way. We really did think we had it all: healthy IRA accounts and prosperity always on the horizon, Volvos in the driveway, college funds for our children, vacations at dude ranches.

That was then, this is now. And now is a teenage boy who came home from school one day joking grimly (ha, ha!) that his senior friends were kidding each other by sharing strategies to avoid the draft: “You shoot me in the foot and I’ll shoot you in the foot.” I remember my college boyfriend having similar conversations with his friends during the Vietnam War.

I want to tell my son how sorry I am that he has to hear words as terrible as anthrax and jihad. That he has to live, like the rest of us, with the constant underlying threat of personal and global tragedy, not knowing what bad thing will happen next. I want to say how sorry I am that the simplest acts in life are now tainted–opening the mail, drinking a glass of tap water, going on an airplane to visit Grandma.

I also want to say that it won’t always be like this, that I can make it better, but the words feel like a lie and I can’t speak them. There is no way to explain what can’t be explained. I have yet to hear any rational person explain how a young mother could attach explosives to her body, kiss her children goodbye and hours later blow herself up along with innocent civilians.

Is it so wrong to want our old lives back? I remember when buildings like the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building were gleaming feats of breathtaking beauty, examples of man’s ingenuity–not potential targets for terrorists. I remember when airplanes were seen as miracles of engineering that brought families and friends together, not weapons for hijackers with desperate political agendas.

Parents today are ever so vigilant. We buy and read all the baby books, we take “Mommy and Me” classes, we go to parent-teacher conferences. We cover the electrical outlets with safety plugs, we check the width of the crib slats, we cut grapes in fourths, we scrutinize movie reviews, we analyze food labels for preservatives. We get up at midnight to lay a cheek next to the mouths of our babies to make sure they are breathing.

Bandages and kisses and assurances won’t assuage our collective guilt, or heal the injured psyches of our children. Logically I know that this paralyzing feeling of parental guilt is counterproductive, and that, of course, none of us could have foreseen and prevented the attack on our nation, nor the domino-like consequences that have followed.

But true logic, as I knew it, flew out the window on September 11. What I’m left with, as I watch my son bite his lower lip as he scans yet another special news bulletin, is the hard, cold knowledge that I can’t fix this.

That won’t stop me from trying. My contemporaries and I were brought up thinking we could make a difference. We may feel a collective guilt and responsibility over the turn history has taken, but I believe our response can be a productive one. We can do what we teach our children to do–take responsibility for our actions, speak out against injustice, educate ourselves about local and global issues, and become involved in something that has a positive effect on the world.