Poorly Told Stories
“Mom? Are we in a war right now?” asks my kindergartener Nora from the backseat.
I take a breath. The view through the windshield in front of me is all early morning freshness, autumn glory, suburban tranquility. Like it so often does, the adult world has slammed into our bubble of innocence, in the car and out of the blue.
Nora’s eight year old sister sits next to her, silent, waiting. Listening.
“Actually, girls, we are in two.”
“Who are we fighting?” Nora presses.
“Well. Um…usually when there is a war, one country had decided it wants to take over another. So they send all their soldiers and say, this is our country now! But the wars we are in now are different.”
I wince at my own words. I hate this. I hate being too simplistic and yet overly complicated at the same time, in the name of child-speak. I wade on.
“One country is called Iraq. And Iraq had a very evil ruler.”
Maybe if I make this into a fairy tale, they can understand it, but still have a protective blanket between them and the harder full reality, a blanket like the one they feel over their bodies at night as Daddy reads them bedtime stories.
“The ruler was so mean that he attacked his own people. And everyone thought that he was building big big weapons, big enough to hurt more people in other countries. So we sent soldiers to find the weapons and take him out of power. They found the ruler hiding in a hole in the ground, (Such a fairy tale!) but they never found his weapons. Turns out he didn’t have them after all!”
The girls are not interrupting me as they usually do. Whether this means I am confounding them or breaking through, I cannot tell.
“And there’s another country called Afghanistan.”
I pause. This one is even harder.
“There were some terrible men. And they did something terrible to the United States. And they planned it… the people who helped them plan it are hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan. Do you remember that picture Aunt Joan sent you? Of the girls in front of the mountain? That’s Afghanistan. But just like in Iraq, we are not at war with all the Afghan people — we are sending soldiers to find just the bad people and to keep those girls safe, to help them go to school.”
“Why do they need help going to school?” asks Mia, my second grader who last week showed me Ricky Ricotta’s Mighty Robot and proudly announced it was her “first chapter book.”
“Some people, the bad people, think that girls should not go to school.”
Too much, too much. Not too much for them to comprehend, but too many of the ways that people hurt each other. I don’t want to say these words.
“What was the bad thing they did to the U…, the United….” This is from little Nora. She is five years old. Her sister is eight. Neither was born into a world where two white towers stood, peaceful and unsuspecting.
My chest and throat tighten for a second, let go. A brief flash of electric blue sky, as beautiful as today’s. A figure in that sky, as no person should ever be. Falling.
“They…they took a plane…Oh, it’s so bad, I can’t even say it.” I do not dissemble. I cannot say the words.
“Did people die?” asks Nora, her piping voice cranking higher to the point just before a sob.
“Yes, honey. A lot of people died.”
“Was there a bomb?”
“Yes…” I stop. I think of words I could say, “…They used an airplane, airplanes. They crashed them into buildings….” I don’t say this horror. I’m not ready to give this awful truth to my daughters.
I come from a family where bad news was hidden as long as possible, and then even longer. The elephants in the room run in herds; the skeletons overflow from behind bulging doors. I swore I would be upfront, open and entirely honest with my daughters. And now this incomplete history is the best I can give them. I have the briefest flash of empathy for the adults who hid difficult truths from me when I was little.
“Oh, girls, it’s really hard for me to talk about.”
“That’s okay, Momma.”
“We’ll talk about this more later,” I promise.
“Okay. Can we listen to music?”
I turn on one of their favorite nonsense songs and start planning a better, later explanation. We silently listen to the music with what feels like relief from ourselves.
If all the world was paper
And all the sea were ink
And all the trees were bread and cheese
What would we do for drink?
The election was this week, with some discouraging results. Four million previously uninsured children now have health care coverage and yet the new House leader calls the law that made it possible “a monstrosity.” I still believe in hope as an action verb, not a noun to be doled out; I still believe our duty as individuals and as a collective is to protect the vulnerable. We will need to soldier on, muddle through, keep the faith, keep trying, like I must do with these children, even if our discouragement comes from ourselves and from the imperfect stories we tell each other.
U.S. Navy photo of an Afghan schoolgirl by Mass Communication Specialist Senior Chief Kevin Elliott, Task Force Cyclone
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Cindy, So nicely done. It is so strange how gray our world has become. Trying to explain to our children things with frayed boundaries…I too “still believe in hope as an action verb”.
Here’s some sobering news. My son was your Nora’s age when we invaded Iraq. He is now in eighth grade, 14-years old. He has asked many, many questions in those years, and every time I have felt exactly like you did — that my answers were both too simplistic and too complicated at the same time.
“Mama, why are we invading Iraq if the bad people who stole the planes were from other countries?”
“Mama, how can the mission be accomplished if people are still dying?”
“Mama, will I have to fight these wars?”
“Mama, will we ever not be in a war?”
“Mama, how could our intelligence be so wrong about weapons of mass destruction? Who is going to apologize for that?”
The questions just get harder and the answers don’t get any easier.