The following is an excerpt from a longer piece I am working on called "Safe Haven," which deals with the relationship between parents and children. Because I am in a transitional period in my life - as the parent of college-age children, and the daughter of aging parents - I find myself frequently meditating on the nature and role of the parent, based on my own experience as well as my observations of my parents' experience. Being a parent is at once wonderful and terrifying, and I am struck by how desperately we parents want to protect our kids from suffering, and how absolutely impossible that is to do. An excerpt from "Safe Haven":

Two days after our first child had been delivered by caesarean, my mother arrived from Pittsburgh like a whirlwind of maternal wisdom and experience. My mother knew exactly what to do in all circumstances, and I was in awe of her capabilities. She had sewn our clothes, canned vegetables, designed doll furniture, bandaged bloody lacerations, and killed spiders with her bare hands. She fed a family of six on a budget of less than a hundred dollars a week, taught my brother how to wire a hand radio, and taught my sister and me how to catch salamanders in the creek that ran along the edge of our yard. She played the piano, printed her own Christmas cards, and could calm my father even during his darkest rampages. Ours was the first grandchild to be born into my family, and I was glad my mother had arrived to help, but in her presence I was more aware than ever of my own inadequacies and imperfections.

One afternoon during her visit, we were sitting on the back porch nursing and rocking the new baby. A subtle breeze rustled through the eucalyptus trees that lined our property, and great puffs of clouds floated across a bright California sky. My new baby smelled of powder and breast milk, and the weight and warmth of his infant body against my chest, his tiny fist still gripping my breast, recalled for me the symbiotic intimacy we shared before his birth. My mother and I were chatting in soft whispers when suddenly she stopped, rose from her chair, leaned forward and swept her hand across the baby's cheek. She made a terrible grimace, clenching her teeth as if in pain, and then she shook her fist free and the squashed body of a hornet fell to the ground. I shuddered. My mother's hand was red and already beginning to swell, and I remembered that she was allergic to bee stings. "I guess I'd better get the Benadryl," she said, calmly. "Mom, how could you do that?" I was hugging the baby close to my chest, imagining his innocent cheek violated by a hornet's sting, and again, I shuddered. "Well," she chuckled casually, "I couldn't let it sting him, could I!"

As a new mother, I wanted to believe that I, too, could perform heroic acts for my children, but it was difficult for me to imagine myself sacrificing my hand to a hornet. I had only been stung twice in my life: once by a wasp that was tickling the back of my neck at summer camp, and again a few years later at my uncle's farm when I accidentally wandered too close to a hive. Once, when I was walking with a friend through the woods, a huge black blood-sucking insect landed on her shoulder. "Get it off! Get it off!" she cried, desperately jumping and shaking her arm. The best I could offer was to grab a twig from the ground and scrape at it; I succeeded only in pushing the beastly thing's stinger through the flesh of her arm. "Stop! It's cutting me!" We were terrified, screaming, helpless girls. At last, a camp counselor answered our cries, and plucked the awful thing from my friend's arm. I am not like my mother. Really, I am a coward, and I was haunted by the image of the hornet on my bbaby's cheek: what would I have done had my mother been the one holding him on that afternoon?

Ten years later we had three sons, and had just relocated to Washington as a result of a job promotion. We were living in a rental house in Tacoma while we waited for escrow to close on our new home. The backyard of the rental sloped gently downhill to where it met the identical sloping yard of the neighbor's house behind us, and in the crevice that formed the median between the two properties, a creek gurgled with melted snow making its descent from Mount Rainier. I grew up playing in the creeks of rural Pennsylvania, and I never tired of hunting and catching pollywogs, crawfish, and salamanders. Likewise, my boys were creature-hunters, and anxious to explore their new territory. On this particular day, the late-summer's sun sparkled between green and fading leaves, and the air was crisp and dry in anticipation of fall rain. The boys had already discovered numerous critters in the clumps of grass that grew matted along the edge of the yard. Matt and his brothers were hunched over the uneven lumps of dirt and grass at the bottom of the hill, probing for the slick black garters that always slithered just out of their reach. I watched my boys through the kitchen window as I washed lunch dishes and mused about the afternoon's activities. I was anxious to get our family settled in our new home, and my mind drifted methodically through the list of chores I had yet to accomplish that day.

My thoughts were abruptly interrupted by screams, and glancing out the window, I saw all three boys racing frantically towards the house. The screen door whipped open and slammed shut as Matt reached the house first, and then Mark gripped the door open again. Instinctively, I ran outside and realized with horror what was happening. A long black line of hornets poured out of a hole beneath a decaying log at the end of the yard, moving through the air like a flying twisting snake. My youngest had stumbled and was lying face down in the long, brown grass. Ryan was only half as old as his brothers, and his legs would carry him only half as fast. The hornets were buzzing haphazardly above and around him, and others were migrating towards the house in search of his brothers. I flung my dish towel at the ones clinging to his sweater and jeans, lifting him to his feet with my other hand, then dragging him towards the house.

Once inside the house, I continued to whip at the hornets stinging his back and arms through multiple layers of clothing when I noticed several hornets attached to his ear - nasty, vicious, flesh-eating buzzers - stinging his reddening ear over and over again. I paused, horrified, watching the striped yellow-black bodies persistently chomp on my child's ear. Still with the towel in my hand, I tried to pluck the hornets from his ear, but they would not come off. Ryan reached for his ear with his own hand. "No!" I screamed at him, and I pulled the remaining hornets from his ear with my bare hand.

Immediately, they plowed into the tender flesh of my palm. "Damn!" I shook them from my hand, squashing them into the floor. When it was over, Ryan's red face and gnawed ear continued to swell, expanding as if his head was a hideous balloon being blown up from the inside, until his ear stood straight out from his face. A few stray hornets buzzed through the house. Ryan was crying. I scooped him up, ushered his brothers into the van, started the engine, and realized that I did not know where the hospital was.

For years, Ryan had nightmares about those hornets. Sometimes I would go into his bedroom and find him tugging on his right ear, moaning in his sleep. Gently, I would stroke his blond head and whisper "Ryan, it's okay - the hornets are all gone," and he would settle back into a peaceful rest. At the hospital, later that day, I learned that his brothers had noticed the hornets coming and going from beneath the decaying log. Mark wanted to see the "queen bee," and he wondered what would happen if he threw a rock directly into the hole; he thought maybe the Queen herself would come out. A foolish but innocent act. I wish I could have protected my youngest from his brother's mistake, but I could not. I was surprised by my ability to get those hornets off of my child's ear, but I realize that courage had very little to do with it. Parents do what they must, at the moment, to care for their children. And parents do what we can to protect our children from all sorts of suffering, but the sobering reality is that we cannot protect our children from life, and the hornets' attack was not the last time trouble swarmed into the tranquility of our home.

Some years later, my parents were visiting, and I was surprised one night to hear my mother scream. I ran up the steps and found her in the guest bedroom, pointing at the wall opposite us where a hairy brown wood spider was crawling across the wallpaper towards the window. He was a decent-sized spider, maybe an inch and a half long; scary looking but essentially harmless. When we lived in Hawaii, I had encountered cane spiders that were (I am not exaggerating) five inches in diameter. I killed one once, as we were driving along the Pali Highway, by removing my shoe and throwing it across the car. Splat - it was a direct hit. My terrified sister-in-law, who witnessed the incident from her huddled position in the seat closest to the invading spider, was astonished at my cool-headed nerve, not to mention dead-on accuracy. In my guest room, I crossed in front of my trembling mother to grab a tissue, and then eradicated the spider with a squish. "Geez, Mom," I said, "You were never afraid of spiders when we were kids."

"Who told you that?" she exclaimed, and I believe she shuddered, but just ever so slightly.