The boy was fine. I was a wreck.

Six years later, my four-month-old daughter developed what turned out to be whooping cough (she had had two of her three vaccines) and after two trips to her doctor and one to the emergency room where I was told she had a “cold,” I drove an hour and a half to see a specialist who diagnosed the disease correctly and treated her (and my entire family) with antibiotics. For three week my daughter slept beside me in the bed so that I could hear her troubling cough and stop her from choking to death.

During the six years between the birth of my son and the birth of my daughter I visited the emergency room four times with my boy, who had a propensity for injuries requiring stitches. (I was afraid I would be reported to social services). Later, at age 13, he was hit in the eye by a pop fly and had a broken nose and a black-and-blue face which we lovingly captured on camera. For three years he grew so quickly that his bones lite*rally ached. Growing pains, I found out, were real.

The thing is, as scary as it is being a parent, it is the kids themselves who will do the things that really terrify you.

And all those physical injuries were actually the easy part. As my kids entered the fullness of their teenage years they frightened me in ways I might should have expected but somehow didn’t. They took drugs they shouldn’t have (convinced as teens are of their own invincibility), they snuck out of the house many more times than those I found out about. They took up with crazy girlfriends and unsuitable boyfriends.

Hell, just seeing them get into a car and drive off was nearly enough to give me a heart-attack.

Seeing them get into a car with a person I did not know was enough to give me a heart attack.

I can’t even describe the fear I felt when each of them went off to days-long music festivals.

I realize, as open and honest a relationship I have with my kids, now that they are 19 and 24. I am sure I missed, even with my incredible radar, all manner of things. In fact, during spring break with both of my children, my son decided to tell me some of the things he had done that I didn’t know about. At more than one point, as curious as I was about what I had missed, I wanted to yell at him: Stop, Stop. I really do not want to know this.

But I kept listening because I had a mother who truly thought that what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. I had a mother to whom my sisters and I could tell nothing, a mother to whom we had to lie about mostly everything for our entire lives.

I don’t necessarily condone full disclosure, but in an odd way it helps. Before you become a parent you can think of everything your child might to do get hurt so you baby proof your houses, you cut up their food into non-chokeable sizes, you watch them like hawks on the playground, when they learn to ride a bike, every time they head out onto the sports field. You teach them not to talk to strangers, you give them the lecture about how it doesn’t matter how good a driver they are because there are crazy people driving on the road beside them. You give them the information on safe sex, drinking and driving, drugs and driving, texting and driving, talking on the phone and driving.

Because even with all this advice, they will more than likely want to talk about things that you might not even have imagine; and at the same time you dispense advice, you really do want to open up a dialogue so that your kids feel comfortable coming to you with issues, questions, problems.

The other thing that parenting a baby or a toddler doesn’t prepare you for is the pain your children will suffer at the hands of others: they may be tormented, bullied, have their hearts callously broken. And here is something perhaps even worse: their friends will die, of suicide or accident, gunshot. And you will have to help them mourn while you are thanking God that you are not the parent of that poor dead child

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I know dear friends whose bright, beautiful children have self-destructed, resurrected themselves and done it all again. I hear from friends whose children have suffered from unspeakable tragedy, whose children have run away, gotten pregnant, joined the Army. I know that even when the best and brightest of kids go off to college anything can happen. Every time I hear about a college student disappearing I want to throw up. I text my daughter furiously: I love you, are you okay?

This is nothing like being a helicopter parent, and yes, my parents, the parents of boomers, were pretty, well, casual, and most of us managed to make it to adulthood mostly intact. But I also remember the memorial pages in my high school year book, black bordered pages signifying a life ended too soon. And yes, my generation did its share of crazy things, we took some extraordinary risks. Those experiences should prepare us for what our kids will throw at us, but somehow, even though we know what may be coming, the fact of it is always a blow.

The thing is, the trouble your children can get into as babies, toddlers, young children, is nothing like the trouble they can get in for the rest of their lives. And the vigilance you practiced as you kept an eye on your babies while they crawled around the living room is the same vigilance you need to practice for the rest of your life. Because your kids will do things that terrify you for the rest of their lives. Your kids will have terrible things done to them for the rest of their lives. FOREVER. You can take that advice to the bank.

Easy, the operating word being easy.

What passes for conversation these days is often, to say the least, inadequate. People of all genders, religions, regions and races have a tendency in these polarized times to seek out information that confirms their beliefs and to spend time with friends with whom they can share their outrage over whatever it is that outrages them. Rather than looking for information to inform or challenge their assumptions and prejudices, rather than think and read and wonder, too many Americans hold fast to their “opinions,” even if those opinions are not based on one single supportive fact. But it isn’t just southerners who should end up holding the bag of stupidity, there’s enough guilt to go around. The same people who easily dismiss southerners as idiots would do well do check their own prejudices at the door.

Yes, the truth is that a huge number of Republican voters in Mississippi and Alabama think President Obama is a Muslim, don’t believe in evolution, and hold other ephemeral convictions. That truth does not serve the South well. But those people should not be the region’s only spokespeople. Just like the stuck-in-the-mud Kansans of Thomas Frank’s book should not represent the entire Midwest, and just like the more conservative Jews who support Netanyahu’s belligerence should not speak for all American Jews.

There is a large and growing number of progressives, liberals and democrats in the South and, as if to put to rest Lyndon Johnson’s statement that with civil rights legislation the South would be lost to the Democrats for a hundred years, they are happily working and living in many southern states. If the baby boom exodus from the north and Midwest to North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida continues, there will be many more. Already Savannah, Georgia, where I now live is seeing huge changes from recent residents.

I grew up in the South of east Tennessee, deep in Appalachia, in a small factory town. My parents were transplanted New England Jews and first generation Americans. I was subjected on many occasions to virulent anti-Semitism, some of it so casually couched that I knew those spewing it had no idea what it was they were saying. My father, a small businessman, was constantly confronted by customers who told him not to Jew him down. Some of the people with whom I went to school can’t to this day even admit the prejudice with which they viewed Jews. Like many other evangelical Christians they seem to think their desire to “save” people of my religion is laudable. Their support of Israel is tainted, too, by the Biblical imperative of the Rapture and its aftermath. Their minds are impossible to open, never mind change. Against the backdrop of institutionalized prejudice (there was prayer in the schools through junior high; the schools in general were not integrated until I was in the fourth grade) I had to figure out, at an early age who I was and what I would stand for. It seemed obvious to me that education and a worldview outside my town was essential and so I pushed to get out and go Up North.

But when I went to college in Rhode Island I experienced another kind of prejudice. There many students made fun of my mild southern accent and rural roots; they needed convincing that I was as smart as they were. And so I had to prove myself in a different way. Once again, I made my mark by paying attention, reading, listening, and opening up my own mind. Once again I met challenge head on and was molded by it. It saddens me that so many of my countrymen and women seem to think that they just don’t have the time to explore beliefs counter to their own or even to search out the facts behind some of the more outrageous statements made by political candidates and a number of “news” organization.

But that ignorance, that unwillingness to be open and tolerant and educated, is not just a Southern problem. I am quite certain that had the camera been turned on men and women in Maine or Oklahoma or Idaho and Arizona similar comments would be heard, identical viewpoints would be expressed. Ignorance does not stop when one crosses the Mason Dixon line and it is arrogant to think it does.

The South has its issues, as does every region of this country. Some say the weather makes people indolent, others think poverty is the sharpest shaper of worldview. There is still a strong undercurrent of prejudice of a multitude of varieties. But many southerners, by birth or choice, live in quiet harmony with each other, and a large number of southerners work for change every day of their lives. There is a long and wonderful history of the southern liberal and his/her work for civil rights, voting rights and equality for everyone. The first white child born in Georgia was a Jewish boy; Jews have lived and worked in the South and deep South since before we became a nation. The overthrow of Jim Crow laws in the South made a difference everywhere in America and black men and women worked together with white men and women, often in danger of their lives, to effect change that was overdue and necessary. I don’t share the South Will Rise Again mentality of the confederate apologists but I do believe that the South will continue its transformation into a place that discourages prejudice of all types. In that good way it can and will rise.

I had a wonderful professor in college who said to my class one day, “Some lies are so damn good a man would be a fool not to believe them.” That statement is true of our political process today as the memes and lies build on themselves and convince far too many voters of their truth. But I will continue to urge the rest of the country not to dismiss the South on the basis of the ugly statements of the ignorant and uneducated. Not to dismiss all of us because some of us believe those hard lies. No area of the country is without its unenlightened. And it will be always thus.