I'm not the first who'll say that the best conversations with a kid happen in the car. A captive audience: she has got your attention, you've got hers. Nonetheless, yesterday, we hit the big topics while at the farmhouse. Snowdrop and I had just finished a book that had quite the serious World War II content and she told me that coincidentally, her third grade teacher started in on a book (for reading to the class) that also hit that same topic of the war. She tells me -- I saw a picture of Hitler. Not much one can say to that, except that World War II is a topic I talk about with a sense of not only history, but personal history. At 70, I obviously wasn't a child of the war, but I was a postwar baby in a country utterly destroyed by the Nazis and so I treat the passing down of facts and reflections on that topic seriously. I tell her -- Hitler was such a cruel despot, that when you want to emphasize someone's terrible use of power, you often say he (she) was like Hitler.
A little later, Snowdrop asks -- was Hitler like the devil?
This stumps me a little. Snowdrop has a very devout friend who has been sharing her church related thoughts and beliefs freely and I don't want to tread on that exchange. So I ask -- you mean, like what we feel the devil stands for? Utter meanness?
Gaga, don't you believe in the devil?
As in a force that propels all of us to do bad things sometimes? That's too whimsical for her. No, like the devil acting for Satan.
So, the devil is just a team player and the Satan is the leader? I figure it's best to ask. Those who have read Like a Swallow certainly know this about me: my religious education is, for better or worse, very... scant.
Yeah, I guess.
So, he's like at the head of a table and gives orders to devils, who follow through?
She laughs. But she wont give up. "Do you believe in..." is not an infrequent question for her. Well, do you? So I ask back -- you mean, not as a force of evil but as a red figure, maybe with a tail? She laughs again, but she pushes forward -- yeah, sort of.
No, I tell her. I do not. You know that Ed (she has a nickname for him, but we'll leave that for the files) and I believe in the world that we feel and see before us. Animals, nature, people. As I say this, I sense how imperfect my explanation really is. I mean, we don't see or feel the entirety of the universe and yet, we don't doubt its existence. Lucky break for me -- we are in the car and approaching our drop off point and she is resolutely using my phone to text her parents, firing questions about the devil. Offloaded to parental insight!
I think about how we like to have kids figure things out for themselves, but of course, we can't pretend that they're not listening to what we say to them. And yet, as a grandparent, I watch myself. I'm not the one to shape their worldview in any significant fashion. I can tell them to eat their fruits and veggies and wash their hands after school, I can give them ideas about how to manage sad feelings or school playground dynamics, but I like to stay to the side of big ideas. I'm not the one tucking these kids in bed at night and reassuring them about monsters. I feel I was given a pass yesterday, and yet today, as I get going on my morning chores...
... I'm thinking I need to do better in the way I answer some of the trickier existential questions that the kids throw my way. After all, we spend a lot of the time in the car together!
Now, about the morning... Good morning, farmhouse sleeping cats! Ready to go out?
Breakfast. Oh, just fruit today...
Then coffee and sweet stuff with a friend downtown.
And since I am near commercial areas, I go on to shop. I'm on the hunt for stuff that will display my Polishness to little kids. "huh?" -- you ask. More on this toward the end of February.
Okay, Sparrow and Snowdrop pick up time.
Thankfully we stick to smaller topics today, such as whose day was better/worse, who had what friend issues and for what reason. Those aren't easy, but at least an adult response can be straightforward and predictably gentle and guiding. Less tough than discussing Hitler and the devil.
(claiming Ed's computer "just for two minutes")
(secret thoughts written daily in secret journal with secret ink)
In the evening, I exhale. I had so little free time today that I am truly happy to just have these moments on the couch, with Ed, watching a show, exchanging comments on very inconsequential topics. Perfectly calm, perfectly lovely.
