Mpho from the Kopanong Bed & Breakfast in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town, took us for a leisurely stroll around the neighbourhood we were staying in. We visited a kindergarten and a shabeen tavern made of plates of corrugated iron.
People invited us into their houses and shacks. We posed for pictures with them. – Say Khayelitsha! Mpho shouted before pushing the camera button. There was real pride in her voice.
- It’s a good thing your children get to see Africa at such a young age, she said. In the same tone someone would say it’s good for them to drink their milk daily.
“Sad or dangerous things never happen,” my almost 3-year-old daughter said to me out of the blue, as I was tucking her in for the night last Sunday, in the double bed she shared with her sister in our hotel room in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina.
We had spent the day wandering around the old, eerily beautiful town. The river Neretva, which runs through it in a deep gorge, is a surreal shade of pure, bottle green. Stari Most – the elegant, 500-year-old bridge that was blown into smithereens in the early 90’s during the Balkan war – has been rebuilt meticulously, and the historical center has been restored with great care.
Outside it, you can still see a lot of post-war rubble and other remnants of horror. We walked past a Muslim graveyard with 1993 as the year of death on every headstone, of old and young people alike. Along the former front line stood the numerous, grim skeletons of houses, and the faςades of the ones still left standing were pockmarked by bullet holes and shrapnel scars. We took a few snapshots, feeling guilty about gawking. My daughters didn’t seem to pay any attention to the crumbled buildings.
Around the ruins, life was bustling. Billboards advertised mobile phones and boasted about faster Internet connections. People were going about their business of living, selling, buying, eating, sleeping and raising children, as normal as in any town I’ve ever visited, if perhaps a little subdued by the crisp, cold weather. I didn’t understand how any of it could be possible – not the war, nor the peace afterwards.
“No, they don’t happen,” I now heard myself reply to my daughter, immediately hating the dead weight of the lie around my neck. I should have been able to think of a way to dodge that one. It felt wrong. But I wanted her to go to bed peaceful and happy.
And I wanted to think she really believes it. For a little while longer.
“Sara’s grandma was so old that she died in her bed.”
“Oh… She must’ve been really old then.”
We were driving back home from IKEA. Grim thoughts sometimes plague me, too, after spending an afternoon there. But my daughter, who recently turned 5, didn’t seem to find the topic gloomy at all.
“Sara said that all her brothers and sisters cried. Or one brother and two sisters. But Sara didn’t. And her Mum didn’t cry either,” she continued.
“They didn’t cry?”
Must have been the mother-in-law.
“No. Sara already knows that everybody dies.”
“Oh.”
“Everybody dies sometimes.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“I will die one day, too,” my daughter said very matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, but not for a long time. You’ll have many years to do lots of things before that.”
She didn’t seem worried at all.
“Yeah, I’m only going to die after my own grandchildren are dead.”
“Well, you’ll be really, really old then.”
“And you’ll be dead, then, too,” she said cheerfully.
Nowadays, I have no problem talking about death with my kids. The first time it happened, it honestly freaked me out, but after a few times, you grow a little numb. Children want to know why people die, and when I’m going to die, and what happens afterwards. It’s not always simple, of course. Last summer my daughter asked me if children sometimes die, too. How the hell do you answer that? I dodged by saying that in all my life, I’d never met a child who died, so it’s very unusual.
“What if someone shoots them?” my four-year-old asked.
Now, before I had kids, I thought I’d never lie to them. Yeah, right.
“No-one ever does that,” I assured her.
At which point my daughter declared that when she grows up, she is going to shoot children so that they die. Alarmed, I told her that was a terrible idea. She said she’d shoot them and cut them in pieces and sell them in a shop.
“And people will taste it and go mmmm… yummy.”
I’m so glad her uncle and aunt are child psychologists. If she’s still sticking to that plan by next summer, we’ll set up some kind of intervention.
We were arriving home now. It was already dark. All this talk about death had made me drive slower than usual.
“I’m going to live with you when I’m a grown-up,” my daughter said.
“I know. You’re going to clean our house.”
It’s all part of her plan to grow up to be Cinderella.
“Yeah. And if Owen doesn’t want to live in our house, I’ll marry someone else.”
“Good thinking.”
Owen’s a brawny little fellow in her class, who hit little Louise very hard when all the children were fighting over the piñata sweets at my daughter’s birthday party. I like little Dirk much better. He has a crush on my daughter. And he was the only boy who didn’t refuse to eat the cupcakes we made for her class on her birthday. All the other boys said they were too sexy, because they had pink icing and tiny butterflies and Disney princesses on top.
“I promised Owen we’ll get married when we’re grown ups.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“But if he won’t live with us, I’ll just marry someone else.”
Dirk! Dirk! I was thinking, but I bit my tongue.
She’ll just have to figure out some things by herself.
“My t-shirt is not sexy!”
“It is too!”
“Are you saying it’s sexy?”
“It is sexy!”
I walked into the living room to find my daughters, 2 and 4 years old, in a heated debate just about to turn violent. The topic didn’t exactly surprise me. The concept of sexy has been popping up in our household lately, ever since the kids in my 4-year-old’s school taught her the word. It’s an insult. The little boys annoy the little girls by claiming pink (their all-time, unanimous favourite colour) is ”sexy”. Last time I heard it had ended with the girls running away screaming and the boys following them, yelling: “Sexy! Sexy! Sexy!” My daughter came home that day seething with indignation.
“Do you even know what sexy means?” I asked the girls now.
After a moment, they had to admit they had no idea.
“So, how can you call something sexy then?”
Mum 1, kids 0. But now they wanted to know what it means.
How do you explain the idea of sexiness to people who don’t know what sex is? My oldest is aware of the cell-level mechanisms of procreation as well as the workings of pregnancy, because she asked about it last summer and I explained. She still tells me sometimes how she finds it such a pity that it doesn’t work in the neat way she had imagined: that men give birth to little boys and women to little girls. But as far as I know, she has no idea yet that something called sex is (well, most of the time) involved in the process of making babies. Even if she does (never underestimate the schoolyard as a source of less-than-accurate information), I don’t think it would have helped me much here.
In the end, I just told the girls sexy is something grown ups like to look at.
“Eww,” was their spontaneous reaction, as if there was something inherently icky about grown up preferences.
But ever since this discussion, the word has substituted “pretty” when my daughters want to flatter me.
“Mum, that is a sexy shirt.”
“Mum, your nose ring is so sexy.”
“Mum, you look sexy today.“
It doesn’t help one bit that hearing it never fails to crack me up. My guess is the girls believe they have found the ultimate compliment. My husband gets his share, too. According to his wee daughters, his whole wardrobe is steaming hot and his soul patch is smoking. (As it is, actually.)
I’ve decided not to make a fuss about it, although I really wouldn’t mind if the girls scrapped the word from their vocabulary before we visit my in-laws on Christmas. I suppose I just have to practice keeping a straight face and not reward them with attention whenever they call me sexy. After all, they quickly forgot the “we will, we will f*ck you” song my oldest had picked up from school as well.
At least I hope they have.
My daughters, 4,5 and 2,5 years old, don’t speak any English, but they are curious about the music I listen to. What are those people singing about? I often tell them little stories about the songs, sometimes based on the lyrics or the video, or just images the music calls up in my mind. I love the way the girls sit and listen attentively to the songs afterwards, trying to hear my story in them. And sometimes they make requests. Like today.
”Play rock music!” (Despite the seemingly unlimited choice, I have already learned the only thing they will settle for is Nirvana’s Unplugged album.)
”Play the one where that man climbs up on the roof and sits on the chimney to warm up his butt,” asks the 4-year old, giggling. (Damien Rice: Coconut Skins)
”Play the one with the ghost girl,” whispers the 2-year-old, wide-eyed. ”The song where there’s a ghost outside the window and she wants to come inside… and then the boy lets her!” (Kate Bush: Wuthering Heights)
”Play the one with the fairy who’s throwing away all her forks and knives.” (Björk: Hyperballad)
”Play the one where the man is driving and he sees an airplane come closer and closer from behind and it flies really low over his car and CRASHES,” asks the 4-year-old excitedly. (Clinic: Come Into Our Room – and no, I have no idea how I came up with that story, but it really seems to appeal to my children)
”Play the one with the girl who works at the bank.” (The Velvet Underground: Sweet Jane. Both girls join in on the chorus at the top of their lungs: ”CJ!”)
”Play the one where Chris Martin has baby Moses in his arms and they’re dancing really fast and the baby laughs and laughs.” (Coldplay: Speed Of Sound – hey, don’t look at me like that, my oldest went through an intense Coldplay period when she was 2 and there was nothing we could do about it. Her favourite song was Politik! And she came up with this particular mental picture by herself, after numerous queries about the singer and his family. No tabula rasa proponents in our household, they really have a mind of their own.)
But sometimes there just isn’t enough information.
”Play the one with the angel,” the girls demand. What angel?
”Mom!!! The angel!!!”
I recall vaguely that some time ago, I told the girls some little musical story about an angel, but I have no idea who or which song it was. We try Tori Amos. No, it’s not her; she’s the one with Rice Crispies and a bunny. Cesaria Evora? No! Suzanne Vega? No, no, no!! Björk?
”No, she’s a fairy! Mom!!”
I can’t find the right one. Big disappointment. I plop the outraged kids in front of the telly to calm them down with the same soothing Polish animations I grew up with, and go make flatbread and veggies for dinner. The musical requests are over, for today.
PS. If anyone has suggestions for angel music, I’m all ears. (Although I might not dare to bring up the topic with my kids any time soon. They have poor tolerance for bad DJs.)
This morning, my 4-year-old daughter asked me why Sinterklaas never travels to my native Finland. Sinterklaas is a Dutch and Belgian version of Santa Claus who arrives in early December with presents for well-behaved children.
“Maybe because he’s Catholic,” I answered without thinking. Like Oma and Opa, my daughters’ Belgian grandparents. I explained there are almost no Catholics in Finland at all.
That led my daughter immediately to deduce that if
- Sinterklaas knows everything and
- he is Catholic
therefore, he must also be right about being Catholic. So we, too, should believe in that Invisible Dude helping people (as I had once tried to describe the Christian concept of God to her). And we should tell that to everyone!
Uh-oh. We have an itty-bitty missionary in our atheist/agnostic hands, I realized.
I suggested she should perhaps sometimes talk about all this with her great-uncle Jo, who has spent a lifetime doing exactly that kind of work in Africa. But I also added that many people find it very annoying, if you start telling them what they should believe in.
“Oh, right…”she said. “Well, we should write them letters then. Millions of letters. To all people, absolutely everyone.”
At this point I had to remind her that I personally wasn’t sure if great-uncle Jo, other Catholics and the rest of Christians were right or wrong. My daughter saw immediately through this half-hearted attempt at agnosticism:
“You don’t believe in it.”
She reminded me how she had once, fairly recently, woken up in the middle of the night, afraid of the invisible witch that keeps hiding her things so she can’t find them when she needs them. I remembered it, too. Pitter-patter into our bedroom: “Mum, do invisible people exist?”
I had assured her they didn’t. Now she held me to my statement, which in turn prompted her to re-evaluate her premises.
“I think Sinterklaas doesn’t know everything after all,” she surmised.
Mum 1, Sinterklaas 0. I didn’t want to bring any agnosticism back onto the breakfast table, to avoid stirring up her fear of the invisible witch again. I also decided it would be her Dad’s job to break her little heart one day by revealing that Sinterklaas probably doesn’t exist, either.
My daughter pondered the matter and decided she would still leave a bottle of beer out for Sinterklaas (“And carrots for his horse,” I reminded), as is customary on December 6th, when he arrives in the dead of night. It is his birthday, after all.
And we can afford to be kind to people even if we don’t agree with them.
