It’s 8:15. Becca’s in bed. She’s been fed, bathed, read to, kissed. By multiple people. Next stop: Dreamland.
“Mom?”
“Yes….”
“When I am thinking, what is my brain doing?”
There she is, looking at me with The Big Eyes, like I know absolutely everything. All parents suspect these times are coming and yet, we are completely disarmed by them. And at least at my house, they always seem to happen right before bedtime.
This means the answer will have to be easy for a 4-year-old to understand, and not too scary so she’ll still go to sleep.
I start to search through my mental file cabinet for what could possibly be said to answer this question. Myelin, synapse, neurotransmitters, posterior parietal cortex… eek maybe not.
Becca’s questions always seem to have a grossology element to them.
... What holds my eyeballs in?
... Why does my heart make a noise?
... Why doesn’t my hair hurt?
Gray matter? The cognitive mind? Descartes?
Finally I settle on a figurative explanation. “Your brain is like a computer. It has lots of wires and when you think, the wires send words and pictures to you and show you a little movie of your thought inside your head.”
“So my brain is drawing pictures in there?”
I realized that I only really gave a C+ answer and now I have to live with it. “Yes, sort of.”
“And if I close my eyes and think, I can see the pictures?”
“Yes! Why don’t you try that.” There now.
Then half an hour later, I’m tucking in Sarah. And here we go again! The same night! Usually I get some time to recover from these and try to learn from my mistakes before the next one rears its head.
“Mom?
(Uh oh!) “Hm?”
"When I grow up, I don’t think I’m going to have any babies.”
I know what’s coming already. “Why not, honey?”
“First of all… it is going to hurt. Right? I mean it DOES hurt!?! If they didn’t give you morphine it would hurt a TON!”
“Shhh… you’re going to wake up Becca.” (and this would be a disaster because then I would have both of them playing stump the judge) “Plus I didn’t get morphine, I got an epidural.”
“Well if you didn’t have an epi-whatever, it would have hurt!”
“Sarah. Believe me. The hardest part of parenting is the 18 years that follow the 7 hour birth.”
“Well, I’m going to adopt two children. And I think I want to be the home person, the man can be the work person.”
“Really? Why do you say that?”
“Because I want to know everything about my kids. I want to know what they like and don’t like, what they ate, when they slept. I don’t want to give that up to someone else.”
Ouch. “Sarah, I work, and don’t I know all those things?”
“Well, yeah I guess. But still. Mom, don’t you wish you were with us during the day? I mean, Dad does a good job and everything, but like, he’s not a mom. For example, let’s say I fell backwards in a chair, and the chair and me fell over, and the chair like fell on me and everything. Dad would be like, oh no! That chair is broken. And you would be like, my baby! My baby! Are you okay?”
“But that’s good, Sarah, it just means we have different roles in our family. Plus, why were you leaning back in the chair like that?”
"MOM!!!" (Eye roll)
By now, I’m exhausted. What was this talk about? Childbirth? Parenthood? Me?
Usually Sarah’s 8:45 p.m. questions are about the inequities of life:
... What is rape?
... Why isn’t there a woman president?
... Why do people care if you are Jewish or not?
Tomorrow night, we’ll be back to normal… complaining about buying the wrong toothpaste flavor and negotiating how many books can be read before lights-out. But tonight was a doosey. Sometimes I feel I’m pretty good at this parent thing. Tonight, I feel as clueless as I did before I had kids.
