I emerge from my house at 7 am, haggard with exhaustion, kiss my husband, Chris good-bye and hustle my son, Dylan, to the car and into his car seat. I slide into the driver's seat, turn the ignition and check the time. I have twenty minutes to make it across town. As I glide down the street, careful to stop, briefly, at every stop sign, I switch on the radio to NPR and we are abruptly immersed in the story of a downed plane in Iraq and five dead men. "Friendly fire" they call it. "Why did five men die?" Dylan asks. "Mom?" he persists, as I grope to change the station, "why did they die?" "Good question," I murmur. "Dylan, isn't this cool music?" I ask of the jazz that will, I hope, divert his attention. "Mom? Why did you turn that off?" I look outside at the terrain we are traversing for something with which to distract him. What I see is a row of houses, painted with now faded orange X's, the infamous mark of Katrina. Down the street, five police cars are parked in front of the projects, lights flashing, a crowd gathered. "Mom!" Dylan shouts again, insistently, "WHY DID THOSE MEN DIE?"

Since Katrina, I have struggled with the question of what and how much to tell my young son of the hard truths with which we, in the New Orleans area, live. Telling him about the hurricane and why we evacuated seemed, from the beginning, unavoidable. Telling him about the broken levees, the flooding, and the devastation of countless homes was a truth of another order—one that exposed something other than the force of nature, namely human error—but also, after a certain point, unavoidable; Dylan has several friends whose homes were destroyed and who were displaced for a year or longer by what is commonly referred to as "the flood."

Of the pervasive threat of crime in the city, I have said little to Dylan, in the hopes that I can shield him from knowledge of the serious threat and demographics of crime in this area. Despite my efforts, however, an awareness of criminal activity has found its way into his budding consciousness; last year a friend shared with Dylan the fact that his father's bicycle was stolen from behind his house; this summer Dylan's hardy red stroller was stolen from beneath the front stairs of our house, and there has been a rash of burglaries and two armed robberies in the neighborhood this fall.

Lately, however, my negotiation of what to communicate and what to withhold from Dylan has transcended the local scene. I am an avid NPR fan and cannot resist, as I am on my way to Dylan's school at an uncivilized hour, indulging in this normally innocuous passion. Unfortunately, as Dylan has matured, he, too, has begun actively to listen. At first, he would ask such questions as "Mommy, what is global warming?" to which I felt responsible to reply in an honest, if oversimplified way, imagining that I could turn my answer into a lesson on pollution and the need to respect the earth. Next, however, Dylan began to repeat pervasive references to the Iraq war. With some knowledge, thanks in part to popular culture, of soldiers, weaponry and, well, death, Dylan's questions on this subject were more informed: "Mommy, why are we dropping bombs?" or "Mommy, why were those men killed?"

My initial reaction was to change the channel to the local jazz station and attempt to engage Dylan in a conversation about music or to point out the window at what I hoped would provide a novel distraction. But Dylan is not be easily deterred and novel distractions were, at times, hard to come by. And in truth, I felt genuinely conflicted about how to navigate the issue of our government's role in the global arena. On the one hand, the protective mother in me wanted to deny everything ('war? what war? they're just talking about a bad computer game for older kids…"). On the other hand, for better or for worse, I've made a point of never lying to my son. If I can avoid an explanation that I fear may prove too much or too challenging for his developing psyche, I do. But if I think he might benefit from information, packaged intelligibly and appropriately softened, if I think he might apprehend some important value, I typically take a stab at translation. In this case, I was at a loss as to the right course of action. There is no easy translation of our war. Moreover, my own strong feelings made it difficult to resist a strongly partisan rendering of the issue.

In the end, I decided that I had no real reason or motivation to attempt a neutral explanation and that Dylan might as well know some portion of what I deem to be the truth. After all, I instruct him not to hit his friends. Would it not be equally instructive to note to him, given his incipient awareness of ethics and etiquette, that our country was wrongfully "hitting," so to speak, another country? That we were not, in fact, "using our words"? Personally, I was against the idea of this war when I first caught wind of it (again on NPR) in October of 2001. And no amount of questionable propaganda either linking Saddam Hussein to Bin Laden or conjecturing "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (which, when I was a kid were simply "nuclear weapons"), could convince me of its legitimacy. So I considered my strategy. I could, I reflected, begin with 9/11 and provide Dylan with some background on our declared "war on terror" but quickly discarded this option as my mind crowded with images of ant-like figures leaping from the burning towers, and chose, instead, to focus on oil.

>"Dylan?" I venture, with sudden daring, in response to his frustration, "you know how I once said that the President of our country—you know, the "captain"—is not very smart?" (Growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River, my son understands the concept of a captain) "Well, because he wanted more oil for gasoline—like for cars?—the President decided that we should fight another country for their oil." "That's bad," Dylan acknowledges somberly. "Right," I continue, feeling empowered, "it's sort of like how you feel when someone takes one of your toys without asking to share." "I always share," Dylan lies. "Well, you don't always share, but anyway, you see what I mean—it's not good when a president starts a war or a fight in order to get something from another country." "We need a new president," Dylan observes calmly. My son really is gifted, I think to myself, negotiating the morning traffic, and enjoying the easy rhythms of New Orleans jazz.