I was brought up on the Little House books. My mother read them out loud to us, snuggled up on a couch with our pajamas on. We had lots of questions about everyday things from the olden days. But one thing particularly concerned me. “Why didn’t Laura and Mary ever go to the bathroom?” I asked my mother.
I don’t exactly remember her answer. Something about books not being real, I guess. I have added this memory to a list I’d started: “Questions I Asked my Mother as a Child.”
It’s not the answers that keep popping up in my head: What sticks with me is the process of being puzzled by something that wasn’t supported by things I already knew (Everyone goes to the bathroom!), trying to work it out and then getting help to see it clearly. There was the before, when I didn’t know, and the after, when I did and always would.
“How do you get new seedless watermelons if they don’t have seeds?” “Why don’t the people in Australia fall off the earth?”
“Why did that woman in the store call you ‘hon’? She doesn’t even know you.” “What did Billy Joe McAllister throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge?”
Some were indignant questions about being a girl. “Why do we have to wear skirts to school in the winter when the boys can wear pants?” “Why does Jenny’s mom have to go to a job?” “Why are the teachers all women and the principal always a man?”
The Catholic kids down the street introduced me to religious concepts, like “God can see you anywhere.” I asked Mom, “Even when I’m in the bathroom?” Of course, some questions don’t have an answer.
Recently I was reading a falling-apart paperback of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera, and a page fluttered to the floor. It contained this thought:
“Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naïve of questions are truly serious,” writes Kundera. “They are the questions with no answers.”
Children understand how things should be: People should be nice to each other, things should be fair. Adults tell them how they ought to act, then children find the contradictions in the adult world.
When children ask about it, the answers leave them more confused than before.
The most powerful questions I very clearly remember asking came from pictures and stories I saw in the news. I was 8 in 1963, when there were demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama.
Why are they aiming fire hoses at those people? Why are those dogs attacking? Do fire hoses hurt?
Why are they yelling and looking so angry at that girl going to school?
“If white people in the South hate Black people so much, why do they have Black women bring up their babies?”
“If you’re not supposed to kill other people, why is it OK for soldiers to kill in a war?” How can there be such a thing as a war crime? Isn’t all killing a crime?”
These were painful things that challenged my sense of fairness and logic.
But, as another popular song of the period said, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
Then it was my turn to answer: My daughter Sally, one day when she was in perhaps third grade, came into my room, crying. “Mom, what’s vehicular homicide?” she asked me. She’d been reading in the paper about a young man who was going to jail after he’d accidentally run into and killed a pedestrian. (I didn’t even know she could read that well.) “He didn’t mean to!” she cried, and I had to somehow find a way to explain how the adult world has built up a way to deal with ambiguities and competing claims to justice. It kind of broke my heart.
I still have a lot of questions without answers, maybe more than ever. Many still from the news. Why are some people’s lives devalued and discounted, why is our history being rewritten, why are the rich back to getting richer, and the poor still suffering, why is the progress that I watched being fought for when I was a child being taken away again? As a 7-year-old, I knew it was wrong to use fire hoses and dogs on people asking for justice, that women would make good principals, that war was immoral. My mother gave me the right answers, the right way to think about the puzzling contradictions. But she couldn’t really answer.
Maybe we should make decisions by thinking of how you would answer as a child would: Is it nice? Is it fair? Does it make sense? The answers should be something that could satisfy a kid snuggled up on a couch with you.
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