Living with my Boychild is like living with a person from a foreign country- one whose culture doesn’t have humor. Like an episode of Perfect Strangers (starring Boychild as Balky), I often find myself trying to explain what was funny or why I’m laughing. “But Cousin Mommy, why did you just laugh?” “Well, Balky Boychild, your dad made a joke about Mitch McConnell eating a bowl of pudding and I thought it was funny and it made me laugh.” “What is this ‘joke’ you mean?” asks Balky Boychild. “It was a joke. Don’t you have jokes in Toddleria?” Boychild explains, ” No. In Toddleria, jokes have YOU.” Toddlers are very literal people.

Do you know what’s harder than trying to explain jokes to a pre-schooler? Trying to explain death. It began back in October, with Abraham Lincoln. We were watching Greeny X, which is what my son calls a show on YouTube. That’s not its name, but that’s what he calls it. This show is fun and good because it teaches small children letters and colors and stuff that we adults take entirely for granted. In working with the letter “A,” Greeny X mentioned Abraham Lincoln.

Sidenote: Boychild and I have been working on stuff that exists in the “real World” like dolphins and lions, and stuff that doesn’t exist in the real world , like The Grinch and Shrek- basically any biped who’s green and can talk. Dinosaurs are hard to explain because they did live in the real world but, they’re not here anymore. “Why?” Because there was an asteroid called the Chicxulub asteroid and people think it wiped out some of the dinosaurs. Oop. I can’t say this, because it wil give him nightmares of asteroids coming for us. So.  I say instead that some dinosaurs evolved into birds. “Why?” Okay, and then we get into discussions of evolution.  I imagine creationism is much easier to explain to a child than evolution. “God did it,” is waaay more succinct than “Well, Darwin formed the theory of natural selection where mutations that were advantageous to the survival of the species carried on into future generations . . . ” Having a child has given me a profound appreciation of all the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years. I know things. And I don’t know how I’ve learned those things, but I know them, although I did have to research how to spell “Chicxulub.” Sometimes when BC asks me “why,” I just punt and tell “it’s magic.”

Back to Abe Lincoln. I told Boychild that dear old Abe did live in the real world, but he’s dead. “What’s dead?” “Dead is when you don’t move or think anymore. It’s the end of life.”  Boychild pondered that for a moment. “Will you die?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “We all die.” “But I don’t want you to die,” he said, getting teary. I started to get teary, too, thinking about leaving my son behind. “Well, honey, it won’t be for a long time.” “When will you die?” he asked, crying. “I don’t know, honey. But I have a pretty good hip-to-waist ratio, and I stopped smoking, so I’ll probably be here for a while,” I said, weeping in the front seat of the car. He couldn’t see me, which is good. 

Truth is, I’m scared of death. I think only the most enlightened of us aren’t. I’m scared of leaving my little boy. I’m scared of him leaving me. I’m scared of his dad leaving both of us. However, I want my child to not be afraid. I want Boychild to understand that death is a part of life and to integrate that into his life schema. Since that initial conversation, Boychild and I have talked about death many times, most recently in a discussion about vultures. 

Boychild saw a vulture in a book eating something that looked like a rack of ribs. He asked about it, and I told him that vultures eat dead things. “Will vultures eat people?” he asked. “Yep. But only if they’re dead and left out in the woods for a while.” “Why?” was the retort. “Because that’s what they do. That’s their job.” “But would a vulture eat me?” “No. Not really. I mean, I guess if you died alone in the woods, but that won’t happen because you aren’t allowed to be alone in the woods.” He furrows his brow and says, “I want to die alone in the woods.” *pause* “What?” “When can I die alone in the woods?” he asks, flipping over onto his head and throwing his legs over the couch. “Uh, not for a while.” “When will you un-die?” asks Boychild, sticking his hand in his shirt. “You can’t. You can’t un-die.” “Why?” “Because it’s the end. It’s like the end of a book or the end of song. It’s over.” This is not a satisfactory answer for him. “What happens after you die?” he asks, testing my ability to STFU and not tell him everything I know about afterlife mythology. It’s a real existential head-f#ck, raising a child.

Anyhow, my son asked his toy Jack-in-the-bus pigeon ( from Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus) if he wanted to die alone in the woods with him. It was very sweet? I dunno? I mean, he’s scared of the pigeon in the bus- he makes me wind him up and then he runs out of the room- so why would he want to die in the woods with him? Because he’s a bird and he- I don’t know. This is the limit to my knowledge. Does my son really want to go die alone in the woods? No, because he doesn’t understand what it means to die. Am I disturbed that this morning at 6:45am he told me he wanted to die alone in the woods and asked me when he could go die alone in the woods? Yes, it does. I have no answers. Only questions.