My son works too hard, and it’s my fault.

A decent person who becomes a parent starts kicking him or herself for being an idiot about ten minutes after leaving the hospital where the nice nurses know exactly what to do when babies cry. Euphoria moves out and panic and guilt move in. A child comes with no manual, no directions. Your new baby is the most important thing in the world, but the only equipment you have to do the most important job in the world is the seat of your pants. Your own parents on speed-dial. Couple of books, maybe, but there isn’t book in the world that makes you feel better when your colicky baby is still crying at 4 a.m. and you have to get up at 5 a.m. No book can blunt the fears that stab your heart as the post-curfew minutes tick by and your teen-ager isn’t home yet. Especially if you’ve been a teen-ager yourself.

When I taught school, at parent-teacher conferences, I reassured parents that teen-agers making their own decisions is part of growing up and that if the parents let their children make bad choices, the children would learn. That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant, but many a time, depending on the parent, I also thought, “But your kid wouldn’t make such dumb choices if you’d taught him how to make better ones.” This isn’t entirely fair; children often make "non-optimal" choices regardless of parental guidance. Furthermore, blaming parents for what children do, even in part, reinforces what so many parents (including me) think far too often when our children mess up: THIS IS MY FAULT.

(Even though parents and children alike are all just making it up as we go along.)

Somehow, though, our children age into adults, and we’re able to lighten up. Kind of. When your child becomes a parent, say, part of you recoils in horror because he just got his braces off, for crying out loud. Part of you thinks “It’s payback time: I hope she’s just like you.” The last part of you is teary-eyed with delight and joy and, yeah, sadness too—after all, the new bundle of joy means you’re way further along your own life’s path than you’re ready to be. When your only or last child goes off to college, and home turns into a Laundromat, a la carte restaurant, and bank, there’s a sense of “Dang, that went fast. Is it really over?” combined with the joy that comes when you look in the bathroom mirror for the first time in twenty years and nobody’s banging on the door to use the shower. It’s a time to rediscover your spouse, yourself. As the ads would have it, it’s a time to go to Disneyland. It’s not better or worse, it's just different--a lot like you felt when you became a parent in the first place.

But watching your adult children negotiate life reveals more than anything else what part of you stuck to them. When they face a problem, you think about how you’d handle it if it were your problem—you give advice, if asked—but your child navigates the rapids and survives, and the way he handles himself shows you what he really learned from you: How to be a human being. Unfortunately, it’s not all good.

Here’s an example of what I mean. One value that’s been in my family for generations is conscientiousness:
    When you make a promise, you keep it.
    When you commit to something, you follow through.
    When you’re given a job, you go above and beyond because that’s what a decent person does.
Conscientiousness is good, yes?

No. Not always. I worked outside the home as a teacher (a job that sucks you dry, trust me) and reared a child alone. I gardened and canned, wired and tiled, dry-walled and installed in between cooking and cleaning and kissing boo-boos. Not gonna lie—many a time I wished I had the money to just hire somebody, because the real coin of my realm was time. There was never enough because A Single Parent Gathers No Dust.

Turns out my boy watched and learned. He learned that you don’t have fun until the work is done. He learned you leave family celebrations early because you have work to do. He learned that you don’t watch TV or read a book or take a walk if you have work to do. He became the kind of person some parents dream of—but today I’m feeling guilty for modeling my workaholic tendences, especially since I’m the only model he had.

My son is an busy adult. He has a job. He is learning karate. He commutes 50 miles a day round-trip to college, and he lives at home. He does his laundry here, I keep the frig stocked, he has a little suite downstairs—he has his space and privacy, I have mine. It works for us. But he is not outgoing. His only two friends are guys he met ten years ago in high school, and one of them just became a parent while the other has no interest in the things that occupy my son’s mind nowadays. My son doesn’t go to bars: he’s just a quiet, nice guy who’d like to meet new people, make new friends. A week ago, my son paid to go up to the Boundary Waters on a weekend camping trip with an Outdoor Adventures group at his college. Finally, I thought, finally he’s going to hang out with new people. He told me on Friday he was leaving after class that day for his trip, and I said, “Have a great time!”

Saturday morning, his car was in the driveway and he was in his bed. Turns out a computer program he’d spent 30 hours on for an assignment wasn’t compiling by Friday afternoon, so he felt he couldn’t go on the trip. The campers wanted him to come, and they waited an extra hour for him, but he told them to go without him. He worked seven more hours on the assignment and turned it in by his midnight deadline even though it still wasn’t working properly. And so my son missed his trip, he missed getting up into Nature on a gorgeous weekend, and he missed out on connecting with people who might have turned into friends.

THIS IS MY FAULT. I didn’t tell him what to do in this situation—he made his own decision—but I modeled How to Live. I modeled stupid, crazy, long hours and no time-outs and fun only when the work is done. What I should have taught him is that the work is NEVER done, so you’ve got to live a little while you can.

If I could go back and do it over, I would. I’d hire out some of the home repairs and give out fewer assignments to my students. I’d work less and play more.  

So today’s takeaway is this: even if it makes you feel guilty, step off the treadmill occasionally and make a daisy chain with your kid. Don’t wait for a better time, because there’s no such thing, and the lesson you teach your child about enjoying life is more important than completing task #568 on the List of Jobs you will be working on to the end of your days.

Once upon a time, there was a junkyard dog whose nickname was Ollie. He was lord of all he surveyed. His territory was the second-biggest junk yard in the whole world, and he prowled its perimeter daily, his powerful shoulders and big, white teeth ensuring that nobody sneaked in. If anybody tried, Ollie chased them out or ate them up.

Ollie’s ally was a clowder of cats. In return for the dog allowing them to sleep in the nicest junked cars, the cats helped guard Ollie’s turf. They stopped up all the holes they could find. They welcomed everyone Ollie liked and attacked Ollie’s enemies. They spied for Ollie. They sashayed out into the world and took all the food from all the country around and gave it to Ollie (although they kept back some for themselves—wouldn’t you?). The cats kept Ollie rich, and Ollie kept the cats fat. Everybody inside the junk yard was happy, but everybody outside the junk yard had a very hard time finding enough to eat.

One day, a tiny, hungry little mouse smelled the food on the other side of the fence. He stuck his nose through a hole in the fence the cats had missed. Ollie was upon the mouse in an instant. “Get out or I will eat you up!” Ollie growled. The mouse pulled out his nose and ran home to tell his mother. She told the little mouse’s father. He told all the other mice.

The next day, a hundred mice poured through the hole in the fence. Ollie growled and snapped and pounced. He killed several mice. The cats helped him. But there were so many mice, neither the cats nor Ollie could kill them all. The mice who escaped spread out amongst the rusty cars and settled in. Not even the cats, sneaky as they were, could find all the little mice. There were just too many.

When the cats realized their easy lives were over, many left the junk yard for more hospitable homes. They didn’t want to fight mice all the time; they only wanted to win. The cats that stayed promised the  mice they would leave them alone, and the mice said, “See that you keep your promise, or we will chase you out too. And stop bringing all the food in here. That’s stealing.”

When Ollie’s allies were gone, the mice began raiding Ollie’s food dish every night until Ollie was forced to guard his dish or starve. Ollie had to stop patrolling the junk yard. More mice moved in. The first wave of mice fed the new ones and showed them all the paths in the junk yard. And lo and behold, the junk yard stopped belonging only to Ollie. He didn’t control it. He wasn’t the boss.

Ollie retreated to the six feet he could protect and cursed the traitor cats and growled at the mice who passed by him on their appointed rounds, but he dared not leave his dish.

The mice still had to watch Ollie lest he get so angry he chased them again, which he often did. When he chased them, however, the mice sent in a commando squad of their best mice to raid his food dish, and Ollie had to circle back to what the mice had decided was plenty and enough.

Eventually, Ollie learned that he could have as much food as he needed, but he couldn’t have all the food in the whole junk yard. He had to share.

Ollie never changed his mind about chasing the mice out, and they never changed their minds about staying. The mice and the dog distrusted one another forever.

But the junk yard was everybody’s home, and that’s the way it stayed. The end.

One morning last week while walking my dog, I met a guy on the sidewalk: pale skin; dark, thick glasses; long, greasy hair; tattered flannel shirt and puffy jacket in 80-degree weather. My dog’s tail twitched; I said “Good Morning”; the guy nodded. The end.

Or that would have been the end if I were not a writer. Long after my dog had sniffed ten additional trees along our trajectory, I was still thinking about this guy. What was he about? What was up with the winter clothing in August? What if I was the only person who said a word to this guy all day? What if the fact that I spoke to him was a “sign” to the guy that he would not have to kill me? This game of “what if” spun along in my mind for the next couple of days into a disturbing story about a serial killer with multiple personalities. “Something Like a Person” creeps me out because I don’t like the main character in the story. Giving him life is like giving birth to the baby in It’s Alive.

I didn’t set out to write a story about a serial killer. It just came after I saw that guy on the street and asked “what if,” which is the heart of storytelling. A writer’s mind takes one little thing and asks “What if THIS happened instead of THIS?”  Then the writer adds her Cousin Barney’s bad breath and a peek at a road map and Poof! she’s got a story.

Stories come in dreams as well. A few weeks ago, I dreamed about a tattooed arm handcuffed to a dock—yup, just the arm--which turned into my Boucheron Anthology story, “Tsunami Surprise.” Stories come in jars: just over a year ago, my son found a dried-out wolf spider and brought it home, and that sad little event morphed into “Spider Bites,” about a gal with a mother’s love for arachnids.  

Which leads me to ask: Does my having written these two stories mean I am a serial killer or a lover of spiders? Does eating a hamburger mean I hate cows? No. Just because I can imagine something happening doesn’t mean I want it to happen. I can imagine my adult son crashing his car, but if it actually happened, I would—I don’t even know what I would, it would be that awful.

I bet you, too, can imagine something without believing in it, wanting it, or condoning it.

For example, the intro to the TV show Castle, starring the ever-fabulous Nathan Fillion goes like this: “There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: Psychopaths and mystery writers. I’m the kind that pays better. Who am I? I’m Rick Castle.” Nobody, but nobody, with whom Castle works would suspect him of being a psychopath (okay, in one episode he’s a suspect, but put that aside). Castle is a writer. He is expected to use his imagination. It’s part of who he is. It’s required for what he does. Castle, like me, has a brain that launches “What if” scenarios even in his sleep.

But having a talent for “what if” was undervalued recently in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when a middle school teacher (Patrick McLaw) was taken in for a medical evaluation and suspended from his job when it was discovered he had written two fictional books about a school shooting. “Fictional” as in “made up”  or “not real.” This teacher, let it also be noted, had been nominated for Teacher of the Year and had made national headlines when he helped a 14-year-old student self-publish his own e-books on Amazon.com.

Why would a teacher imagine a horrible thing like a school shooting? Could it be because this teacher, like every teacher, is in the line of fire and it’s on his mind? Could it be because he knows he could be the next person to die defending his students in yet another town where “we never imagined it could happen here”--except that Patrick McLaw DID imagine it? His reward for using his imagination—for playing “what if”--was to be suspended and to have his classroom searched and to have his superintendent say, “the gentleman has been placed on administrative leave, and has been prohibited from entering any Dorchester County public school property."

Okay, okay, we live in a crazy world. People are testy. Inclined to incivility. Argumentative. (For confirmation, check your liberal relatives’ responses to your conservative Facebook posts. Or vice versa). People find it hard to “live and let live” to a point where a whole lot of folks don’t put the smackdown on Stupid any more out of fear that Stupid will slash their tires or worse. I get that. I also grant that Mr. McLaw may have violated some clause in his employment contract, or maybe his book’s bad guy is a body double for his superintendent. I have no idea.

But, says United Liberty about McLaw, “Folks, the idea of freedom to write what we want to write is essential to liberty. No, he wasn’t writing some political treatise that would protect all that we hold holy as Americans, but so what? The rule isn’t there to just protect some works, it’s there to protect them all. That includes novels written by a teacher, no matter how much bad taste is involved.”

“Bad taste” references that McLaw wrote about students getting killed, which is supposed to be, and is, a teacher’s worst nightmare. That’s why teachers think about it, worry about it, practice escape plans in the event the nightmare walks their own halls. If I had to, I’d guess that’s why McLaw wrote about a school shooting: it’s his worst nightmare.

Nightmares  of a different sort are made flesh in fairy tales, a genre that takes it on the chin now and again. One objection to traditional fairy tales is that the violence in them might scar children’s psyches. K.J. Dell'Antonia of the New York Times asked in November 2011 whether fairytales are really for children. She agonized, “when you turn the page of a familiar tale and find yourself saying, ‘And presently he fell upon the good woman and ate her up in a moment’ to your wide-eyed child — [it] stirs something universal in parents just as experts say fairy tales speak to something universal in kids. It’s not that we don’t think our kids have contemplated being orphaned or eaten by beasts. It’s that we don’t want to appear to condone that kind of thing.”

If parents fear their children will get the wrong idea about parental values if the kids hear the parents reading a fairy tale, something else here may need to be addressed, because reading aloud or listening to an idea doesn’t mean you condone it. Voltaire’s biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." In 1644, John Milton argued in Areopagitica “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) defends freedom of expression by insisting that truth drives out falsity; therefore the free expression of ideas, true or false, should not be feared.

The idea of a free marketplace of ideas seems to have escaped evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who says it is wicked to teach children about things that could never happen such as a frog turning into a prince. But according to G.K. Chesterton, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

Dangerous things happen in fairy tales. Dangerous things happen in real life, sometimes brought on by dangerous ideas. We could stop allowing people to have dangerous ideas if somebody could figure out how to turn us all into Lotus-eaters. Until that happens, however, dangerous ideas are here to stay and are, in fact, examined at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) held over the weekend at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Simon Longstaff, co-curator of FODI, says, “Our objective in presenting dangerous ideas is not that these ideas be promoted or adopted, but simply that they be encountered and, thus, assessed on their merits. … We believe that ideas of all kinds are best exposed to the light of reason and discernment.” Basically, the festival posits that dangerous ideas exist, so there should be a way to look at them without endangering ourselves. Hence, FODI.

Hence, fiction. Fiction—whether it’s a story about a serial killer or a book about a school shooting or a fairy tale about a wicked stepmother—allows us to try on a variety of scenarios and wrestle with the way the world works. We play “what if” along with the characters, we make choices in tandem with or in opposition to them, and in doing so we learn who we are, who we want to be, and who we CAN be.

So don’t shun people who can imagine the worst. Instead, thank them for showing us how to handle evil when we run into it, no matter how ugly—or how pretty—it looks from where we’re standing.