My Son Is Looking to Me for Answers—And I Don’t Have Them Anymore

As I tucked my 5-year-old son into bed one evening this past spring, drained of all my energy and ideas, I turned to him in exhaustion: “What do you want to learn tomorrow?” The act of desperation, brought on by months of unexpectedly homeschooling my children, became something more. Every night since, I have given him the same prompt. And my wide-eyed son has countered with life’s biggest questions—at the very moment when, on the same cosmic scale, I am unlearning so much of what I used to know.

My generation, the Millennial generation, may not have been especially interested in history; many of us, after all, grew up during the purported “,” an era of . But history has that it is interested in us. From 9/11, when many of us were in school, to the Great