Fear of family flying

My kids are incredibly experienced fliers -- their grandparents live on the East Coast, and they have made at least three cross-country round trips a year ever since they were born. It's gotten to the point that the first thing my 3-year-old son does when he gets on a plane is pull out the pictographic airline safety card that delineates where the exits are and what to do in a crash. He examines these cards with great care, and enjoys telling me all about the inflatable stairs and the rubber rafts.

He doesn't have any concept of what a crash would really mean, and I am in no hurry to lay it out for him, but I did realize, a few days ago, that he was already growing up in a way that I never had.

He had built a tower out of blocks, and as is his usual practice, he was destroying it with gusto. Only this time, he had chosen to demolish it by flying a toy plane into it. That's how towers get knocked down, he informed me.

He's only 3, so I didn't have the heart to instruct him that his act of mock destruction was a ghoulish replay of actual events that had killed thousands. But he had heard me explaining to his sister what had happened Sept. 11. And this was what he had internalized: Towers get knocked down by planes.

For American adults, the World Trade Center attacks represented a new and awful development. But for kids, it's simply the world that they live in, now. My son will grow up knowing that towers get knocked down by airplanes. I'm not sure whether that's healthy or not, but it's a reality -- the potential for mass murder in such a fashion is something he never had a chance not to accept.

As parents, we want to protect our kids from such realities. When a plane hits a particularly bad air pocket, even as my heart stops in my throat, I smile at my kids, and encourage them to think of it as part of a fun roller coaster ride. And my initial attempt to justify flying to New York this coming weekend played upon a similar rationalization. If we just act like everything's normal, the kids won't get upset (and, I hope, the airlines won't go bankrupt, and the world's economies won't plunge into a new Great Depression). By not canceling my flight, I could be trying to help my kids (and myself) hold on to the idea of a United States that is safe from threat -- even as I am more and more convinced that ever greater disasters lurk in the offing: nuclear terrorist incidents and all the rest.

As I examine that rationalization more closely, though, I realize that I'm not really trying to protect the kids -- I'm trying to protect myself, trying to preserve for myself the possibility of a normal life, with turkeys at Thanksgiving, and bad movies above the clouds and friendly skies and all that.

But normalcy is the illusion, as anyone who lives within a mile of a major fault line should be the first to tell you. In the end, I'm going to go flying with my kids not because I don't think it's dangerous, but because I know it's dangerous. Because life is dangerous, and if we're going to live interesting, full lives, we just have to carry on.

• View blog reactions