Heavy Questions
So we’re in the car yesterday, jamming out to the Glee soundtrack. Volume 1 if you must know. And we hear a little 5 year old voice coming from the back.
“Um. Dad. (He wasn’t mistaking me for Dad, he really was in the car.) Is the Earth going to blow up into space? L says it’s going to blow up into space.”
“In 50 billion years!” she chimed in, rolling her eyes. I couldn’t actually see the eye roll, but I could hear it.
“I don’t want the Earth to die.” he said, sadly.
My husband assured him it wouldn’t and we turned the music back on.
Then we hear sobbing. “I don’t want to die.”
“I don’t want to die either,” my husband said. “Everything dies sometime.”
“It’s part of the Life Cycle!” the girl chimes in. (Thanks for that, darling.)
“Well, if the Earth blows up does God die?”
“Um. No. God is eternal.”
“What is eternal?”
“A little help here?” my husband whispers to me. Yeah. I got nothing. And I’m trying to find the highway exit off of Santa Fe. Not as easy as it sounds. “Eternal means forever.”
“Ok. If I die do I come back as a baby?”
“Um. I don’t know.”
At this point we turned the Glee Soundtrack back on.
So let’s see, we’ve covered the end of the world, the concepts of death, God, and reincarnation all in the span of a half an hour. What kind of questions is he going to ask us when he’s in kindergarten?
Later that evening, right before bed, he snuggled up to me and said the words that most cancer survivor mamas dread. “I don’t want you to die, Mama.” I tried not to read to much into it in hopes it was more about the earth exploding than my cancer. I truly dread the day my children realize what cancer is.
“I’m not going to die any time soon, love. And you’re not either.”
“Ok.”
And I let him fall asleep in the chair with me. Probably as much for me as for him.
November 9, 2010
throwslikeagirl74
Throws Like A Girl 