I’ve recently been spending a lot of my time with the Small Girl attempting to answer a series of increasingly unanswerable questions (“why is it Thursday all day today?”, "what are things?”, "is it getting early yet?" etc). Infuriatingly, if she doesn’t accept the answer I give, she merely asks “Pardon?” after I’ve finished my explanation.
This morning the Small Girl asked me “Mummy, why do we have hair?”
"Um, I’m not really sure” I replied, “we just do”.
“Is it so that we can do this?” she asked, shaking her head vigorously.
“Yes, I suppose it could be...” I said vaguely.
“That’s widicleous” she declared, and ran off into the garden to swing on her swing.
We’ve been spending some very pleasant afternoons in the garden now that the weather is warmer. It’s often hot enough for a paddling pool, and on the days when the Small Girl has friends over to play, the children spend happy hours wandering unsupervised through the house and garden whilst we adults sit and talk. We had some friends over for a barbecue yesterday, and as the Small Girl came stalking into the garden in her shorts and t-shirt, eating a handful of cucumber slices foraged from the fridge, I looked at her and wondered: who is this feral little girl who is my daughter? With her wiry frame and her tousled hair and her slender long limbs, smelling faintly of ozone and sun-cream and clambering lithely up the climbing frame, she seemed to bear no relation to her mother – solid, sensible and vaguely anxious.
At least for now, the Very Small Boy belongs wholeheartedly to me. If I as much as leave the room, he fusses and frets until my return, at which point he usually cries desperate tears of relief. Actually, he has got a whole lot easier to deal with recently. He took a great deal of managing in his first few months of life, what with reflux and colic and the ensuing evenings of constant crying. Now that he is seven months old, he can sit up unaided and play happily with his toys. He’s enjoying three meals a day and a couple of bottles (which he took to reluctantly after I was hospitalised during the appendix fiasco), as well as continuing to breastfeed (and I promise I will give that up some time before he starts college). He’s turned into a chilled-out, content little man – “a very jolly baby”, as one friend put it. Oh yes, and now that he’s seven months old, apparently he’s due another developmental check-up. That should be fun.
We were in the car the other morning, stopped at some traffic lights, when the Small Girl pointed out a shop front and asked “Mum, is that a hairdresser?”
“Yes darling” I replied “Very good; that is a hairdresser”
She thought about this for a minute. “But Mum?”
“Yes, Sausage?”
"Why is that a hairdresser?”
I thought carefully before answering “Well, the person who owns that shop must have decided they wanted their shop to be a hairdressers, so they got lots of hairdressers to come and work there and now it’s where people can go if they need to have their hair cut”.
There was a long silence from the back of the car and then: “Pardon?”
I sighed.
"Mum?”
“Yes darling?” I said, bracing myself.
"How's your temper??”
And, laughing quietly to myself, marvelling at this funny little person who is my daughter, I started up the car again and we continued on our way to playschool.
Here's a little diversion on impossible questions: Why is a raven like a writing desk?
ReplyDeleteFrom www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1173/why-is-a-raven-like-a-writing-desk ...
This riddle is famous, although it's the rarefied kind of fame that entails most people never having heard of it. It comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Alice is at the tea party with the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse, when apropos of pretty much nothing the Hatter pops the question above. Several pages of tomfoolery ensue, and then:
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
"Nor I," said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."
At this point most of us are thinking: Ho-ho, that Lewis Carroll, is he hilarious or what? But inevitably you get a few losers who say: Well, OK, but I still want to know why a raven is like a writing desk. One sighs wearily. Guys! It's a joke! The answer is that there isn't any answer!
Oh, they say. (Pause.) But why is a raven like a ...
Lewis Carroll himself got bugged about this so much that he was moved to write the following in the preface to the 1896 edition of his book:
Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter's Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: 'Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!' This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.