The Daily Cover

The kids and I are at the creek, them waving fishing nets and me cradling a handful of broken glass. Beyond the sandy bank that we scrambled down, the tip of the playground's slide is just visible. Here, the shallow water runs brown, and the kids thrash into it, first ankle-deep, then knee-deep, then thigh-deep, until the hems of their shorts darken and droop. The sunrays, slashing through the pokeberry weeds strangling the bank, irradiate schools of minnows. The fish swerve together in startling, dun-colored gusts the same tint as the creek, as if the water molecules have been made temporarily visible. Cicadas drone. The kids catch nothing. In the warm vise of peak summer humidity, we are hot and sweaty and thirsty and happy.

I am hunting glass shards among pebbles and sand. Like the bulleting fish, the glass remains unseen until it's obvious, a jarring flash of brown or green or clear. Some of it is smooth, but most is sharp: the jagged brown heel of a beer bottle, the thin, curved splinters of light bulbs that make me holler at the kids not to kick off their plastic Crocs.

Nets abandoned, they've crouched in the shallows to mold sand into a series of chambers and antechambers that they mutter over, christening it The Network. They are convinced the fish will swim in and trap themselves.

"Come see The Network!" they call to me.

"I'm coming!" I lie. One more threat catches my eye, then another. I can't leave the glass alone any more than my children can give up their single-minded focus on fish. I deposit handful after handful in a sparkling pile. I'm absorbed in my task the way having children sometimes reminds me to be, like when we're coloring together and I catch myself feeling annoyed one of them is using the exact mauve crayon I need.

"Don't let them get away! The net, grab the net!" My oldest barks orders with a ferocity that breaks my glass-trance. I go over to The Network, where sure enough, a few minnows flop in a draining sandpit. After a flurry of Tupperware brought for this purpose, we have three minnows, one for each child, cooped up and capped like tiny pickles in brine.

Done with fish, the children charge back up the bank, past the parched oaks, to see whether any new toys have been left in the sandbox. They don't see the glass that I dump into my cloth bag of car keys and water bottles and caged fish. I can't decide whether I want to point it out or not. Let this remain their idyll today. Let them not notice the trash.

Noticing too much can make life hard. Upon learning about global warming, my oldest talked so passionately about the polar bears and penguins losing their habitats that my husband and I told him to stop. He was making his little sister weep each day over her Cheerios. Her grief—though a logical reaction to the news we are destroying the earth—didn't help us get out of the house with shoes on and hair combed by 7:15 a.m.

I'm baffled to find that I'm a parent who tells her child not to talk about global warming so much. I'm more generally baffled about the contradictions of parenting, how often I do things that run contrary to my beliefs about what a good parent would do. My husband and I met as Peace Corps volunteers in Nepal 19 years ago. We washed our clothes in a bucket; our governmentissued dental floss doubled as thread. Back then, my blurry visions of the kind of parents we might be were sepia-tinged: cheery environmentalists, right-minded activists, even-handed disciplinarians—not that I would have been able to articulate such ideas at the time (mostly I envisioned parenthood as reading Charlotte's Web to a faceless child who never aged or whined). Up close, parenthood looks less like benevolent indoctrination (theirs) and more like...