TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : ROBIN ABCARIAN : Blast Exposes the Daytime Nightmares of Working Parents Everywhere

Was there a working parent anywhere in America on Wednesday who did not fight the urge to rush home to the children? To see that they were safe? To hold them and kiss them and promise never, ever, to take them for granted again?

The images coming out of Oklahoma City were nightmarish, but the ones that were hardest to bear, the ones that brought tears to the eyes of even the most cynical among us, were the pictures of the babies. Tiny, bloody babies in the arms of big, strong men who were utterly helpless.

You realize--with a thud in your heart and a sting in your eyes--that the day you became a parent was the day you lost the ability to detach yourself from the news. You no longer have the emotional filter that gives you a sense of distance on other people’s tragedies. When other people’s children are involved, it is your tragedy too.

That sense of fragility and horror was apparent in people’s eyes this week as they turned from television sets and wiped their eyes. As they bent their heads over their desks and wept for children they never knew.

As parents, we are taught to believe we can make it all better. Even when we know we can’t, we put up a valiant front. When our children scrape their knees, our kisses magically heal the pain.

Where is the magic kiss for the children of Oklahoma City?

And where is the balm for the parents who believed they could leave their children at the day-care center in the morning and pick them up safe for dinner at the end of the day?

It is a simple fact of parenthood that leaving children in the care of others requires an incredible leap of faith. For some, it comes naturally. For most, it is a struggle.

Many parents, in the beginning at least, spend an unhealthy portion of their fantasy lives constructing hideous scenarios about their kids. One parent I know calls this phenomenon “daymares”--the creepy fantasies she has as she drives home from a long day at the office and suddenly imagines that her children may not be there when she arrives. What will she do, she wonders, when she finds at the end of her front walk a broken-down door and bloody footprints inside?

Ridiculous? Maybe.

But who can consider these thoughts excessively dark now that children at play in a federal building-- for God’s sake, don’t they have all kinds of high security? --have been blown to smithereens?

Even parents who stay home with their kids will, at some point, make the leap of faith that working parents make daily.

Eventually, every parent will leave the house--to see a movie, go to dinner, visit the doctor. Every parent will relinquish the care of the children to someone else.

The first time is the worst.

You remember the panic in the middle of the movie, the pause during the “romantic” dinner, the overpowering urge to get home fast, just in case. Did you leave instructions in case of emergency? Can the sitter really reach me if she needs to? Will she know not to open the door to a stranger?

Later, you drop off the toddler with friends and as you drive to the dentist, you find yourself worrying: Are the scissors in that household put away? Do they leave the toilet seats down in that house? Have I ever explained to that Mom how quickly a child can drown in a toilet bowl?

You fight the urge to call every 10 minutes because you have made--and this is the important part--a giant leap of faith that allows you to have two blessed things: your children and your sanity.

And so, you believe you will find your children as you left them because, quite simply, you have no other choice.

What the explosion in Oklahoma City did to every mother and father in this country was to detonate the intricate bridges we have constructed over the chasms of doubt we feel when we are not there to protect our children. Or even--as this bomb has proved--when we are there.

Now the job of parents is to reconstruct the faith, to recapture the equilibrium we felt before this dreadful event as we kissed the children goodby and left for work.

As President Clinton choked back the tears the other night, he asked the nation to pray for the victims of this terrible, terrible crime.

It occurred to me as I watched him that quite possibly, there was not an atheist in America at that moment. Even the most skeptical may have found themselves desperate to believe in heaven, and in angels and in eternal peace for little souls taken too soon.