Soon after our children are born, we get a sense of how smart they are. It doesn’t have much to do with how quickly they learn to walk, talk or potty-train. It’s in their analytical expressions as they sort, stack and organize; the way they utilize their toys for creative purposes; and the way they solve problems to function in a world that limits them.
For those of us who are fortunate and unfortunate at the same time, it dawns on us that our children will someday grow up to be smarter than ourselves.
The mission: to hide this information from them for as long as possible.
Not that this is ever easy.
“Mom, why are the sun and moon out at the same time?” Tyler inquired one evening this week on the way home from the playground. He was in the backseat scrunching his juice box in his hand like he was trying to detonate it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Maybe they’re friends,” Eva speculated from her booster seat in the middle.
I peered at her through my rearview mirror. She was pushing the skin down from her eyes and rolling her eyeballs to the sky.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Is this blood?” she asked, referring to the red ridge beneath the white of her eyeballs.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
I wasn’t taking the easy way out. Somehow I managed to exist for forty years on this planet without knowing these things. I know I have red veins running through the whites in my own eyeballs at any given time of day, no matter how much coffee I consume. Veins carry blood. It’s possible that’s why the flesh under the eyes is red. I could keep on thinking about it until it made sense. But I’d probably get a headache.
Tyler interrupted my thought process. “Mom, how do they get juice in a juice box?”
In a flash, I went from annoyed to angry to indignant. Why couldn’t my kids ask me something simple, like where babies come from? I’ve been preparing that speech for years.
I must have shared this out loud, because the next thing I knew, Eva said, “We already know THAT. We came from your belly!”
It makes sense that that information would be right at their fingertips. After all, I remind them that I carried them for twenty-seven grueling cumulative months every time they forgot to extol their undying appreciation, whether it be for spending a Saturday afternoon folding their laundry or for making a midnight run for Fruit by the Foot.
“But how did we get OUT of your belly?” was Tyler’s afterthought.
Imagine that. For the seven solid years I’ve been prepping myself on the topic of reproduction, I’d only thought of a way to explain how the babies got IN. I hadn’t even considered a child-friendly explanation for the ghastly ordeal of pushing them OUT.
“You know what? I need to focus on my driving. Why don’t you ask each other your questions?”
The silence only lasted a few seconds, and Tyler was the one to break it.
“Eva, do you know what happens when you mix hot and cold water?” he challenged.
“I don’t know,” Eva answered. “I used to know, but it fell out of my brain.”
“It’s warm,” he reported knowingly.
“Well, that depends,” I interjected. So far I was 0 and 5, and I was desperate to regain my credibility. “If there’s more hot water than cold, the water will be warm. But if there’s more cold water than hot, the water will be cool.”
A hushed silence fell over the car. I glanced in my rearview mirror. They were pensive, staring straight ahead. Not a word was exchanged for the next three miles. And for that luxurious stretch, there was brain-restoring silence, except for the wind that whistled through the cracked windows.
At least, until the next fit of philosophical inspiration from the backseat.
“Hey, Eva,” Tyler said with a smirk, “I just ate my dirty socks.”
Eva giggled. “I just ate my underpants!”
They were laughing so hard they were sucking air between yelps.
Even Anna, who had been staring out the window while listening to her siblings’ banter, chimed in. “I just ate the trees!” she announced. (A three-year-old’s humor is nowhere near as sophisticated as a five or six-year-old’s.)
I’d done it. I’d confused them clear back to stupidity. Finally, my kids and I were on the same wavelength.
Maybe now I can answer one of their stupid questions.