"If I have a baby in my tummy, and I don't want it, I can kill it, right?"
"What???!" Whoa! Where did this come from??? I reach for the measuring cups as Heather gets out the sugar.
"If I have a baby in my tummy, and I don't want it, I can kill it, right?" This was insistent.
What happened to "Where do babies come from??". . . What happened to my precious daughter??? Heather, age 5, was bright, popular, and apparently very tuned in to the world around her. I expected that inevitable first question on babies, but certainly not this! What happened to her innocence?? Who taught her this? What's she been up to? WHEN did this happen? WHERE is her childhood?
I measured out the flour, quietly. I had to think, fast! Help me, Lord!
"Well, yes. I guess you can. Tell me, though. Would you kill Angel?" Angel is Heather's fish. She really wanted a dog, but with all of our allergies, that's out of the question. She was ecstatic about the fish...until she realized you couldn't hold them.
"Well, no. I won't kill Angel." The oatmeal goes into the cookies, I think.
"What about all those gerbils?" We only had 2 of them 3 months earlier.
"No, and I won't let you feed them to Joey's snake, either!" Joey is our neighbor.
"What do you suppose the key is, Heather?" We plop dough on the cookie sheets. "Do you suppose that the key is you need to be prepared? We couldn't get Angel until we had the aquarium set up. You had to want her very much before we spent all that money."
"Yeah, and we needed the cage before we got Chambana and Mobey (the gerbils). And we needed food and bedding and water bottles and their wheels and toys..."
"So, we weren't ready to have pets, were we? I suppose that having a baby is the same. You need to be sure you are ready, and absolutely sure you are willing to care for that baby for years until it grows up. You have to be really ready before you let that baby happen."
"So, Mom. How do I get a baby in my tummy, anyway?" THAT was the question I was ready for. . .I think. . . Now, how does it go?. . .
The cookies turned out great, despite my sudden and total lack of ability to bake. Heather kept us on track.
What happened to her innocence? I spent months thinking about this. We don't listen to news in our house. I volunteer regularly in her classroom, and her teacher agrees that the chatter was the usual stuff; talk about differences between boys and girls, and kindergarten crushes. For all I know Heather read about abortion in the newspaper. She was reading, but that much?
Kids know more than we did. They have more to deal with before they graduate into adults. They have fewer societal expectations than I did growing up. I remember when my entire town knew I did something bad. Heather won't have that pressure, and I think she'll be missing an important part of developing her own values. Instead, she'll have to deal with distorted values presented in movies, books, and even classmates. Every book I've read since that cookie day says she will have a much rougher time of adolescence than I did.
Maybe it's good that she understands issues that affect her body. But what happened to her childhood? Her innocence?
I've studied my daughter a long time, now.
I finally decided she is still my child. My bubbly, inquisitive,
wild, excitable, and sometimes cuddly little girl is still an
innocent. She is not in any way naive, but she'll need that knowledge
to survive.