I’ve been one of these schlepping moms myself for the past 15 years. And now, it’s stopping.

To all those political pundits out there who keep tossing around the phrase "suburban vote," it's time to pause and think. If by "suburban" you mean white, middle-class straight families, you are missing the boat.

But in Atlanta, I soon realized, old suburban assumptions die hard. And I found myself in an alternate reality that’s probably a lot more pervasive than I realized, living in my L.A. bubble of multiculturalism. A reality where “the suburbs” is frozen in meaning, as a place that’s white, conservative, and imbued with the smell and spirit of Newt Gingrich.

Something was simmering, a feeling of desperation maybe. It unsettled my sense of calm and confidence in our neighborhood. Our suburb and maybe even my home, all of a sudden, felt threatened.

Over a brief two-week span around the holidays, I was struck by how the dogs in our immediate suburban hub were connecting the neighbors. They made us open doors. They impelled neighborly phone calls. They broke down social barriers, inducing new interactions and connections.

With the passage of nearly a month, the sadness and horror has subsided a little, and it’s given me a chance to think about how this — and previous shootings — could possibly link up with suburbia. My unsettling conclusion is that the suburbs have shifted from a peripheral safe refuge to a center of the action, when it comes to terror.

That home swaddled us. For my mom, the home was an extension of our family, a kind of sturdy vessel of the emotions, love, and life that swirled within its spaces year after year. It was thick with memories.

If you care about the suburbs — their health and future — I invite you to listen to a remarkable discussion about American suburbia by some of the nation’s leading voices on suburban issues.

This is high-stakes suburban competition. Because if you get picked, the payoffs are, well, let’s say — huge. You enter the world of lavish Hollywood production budgets and they don’t hold back if you have what they want. In our suburb, this is the ultimate lucky break.

As my suburban writing partner Andy Wiese points out, we’re seeing a repeating pattern here. It’s the journalists who write — as they are paid to do — total oversimplifications of major social trends and then academics provide critiques along the lines of: “it’s a little more complicated than that…”

The one day of the year that seems to call for this is Halloween. It’s the one and only holiday, for certain, and really the only day where our communities ask us to keep the lights on and willingly open our front door.

It wasn’t necessarily a safer time. But there was something in our heads back then that made it okay for kids to be out and owning the sidewalks and streets of these suburbs.

He’s a bright kid, very responsible. About an hour after he left, the phone rings. It’s my son on his cel phone. He says, “Mom, can you talk to this police officer? He wants to talk to you.” Say what?

I’m Becky Nicolaides. And like 51% of Americans I live in a suburb. I also study the suburbs pretty intensively. Life and work continually collide.