“What would you like for breakfast Mister?” I asked the Very Small Boy yesterday morning at 6.00am as we stumbled blearily into the dark kitchen. “Sugar!” he cried, shielding his eyes and wincing as I switched on the light, before adding “with Weetabix”, then changing his mind “No, no – jam!... with toast”
“Mummy, who are you?” he asked me five minutes later as he tucked into his toast and I gingerly sipped my comfortingly large and very strong coffee. This is just the latest in the endless string of difficult – and often unanswerable – questions fired at me recently by the Small People.
It all began, predictably enough, over Christmas, with the question “Mummy, is Santie real?”. The discussion that sprang from this reasonable-enough enquiry (“he's not actually a real person, but he is real in our imaginations”) led to a whole host of “is it real? ” questions (“Are you real?”; “Is this pasta real?”), which eventually, to my relief, led to a thorough understanding of the concept of “real”; by the time the New Year rolled around, further interrogation was no longer necessary.
“Mummy, is that whale real?” asked the Very Small Boy after Christmas, pointing to the television where “Free Willy” was cavorting damply across the screen.
“Well, that's a real whale” I replied, “but the story is just a made-up story and the people are just actors”
“But, what's that whale's name?” he persisted, looking at me intently.
“Errr... Willy” I replied, bracing myself
“Aaaaaaahahahahhaaaaa” the Very Small Boy fell to the floor, clutching his sides and rolling around, laughing hysterically. Then he sat up again and looked seriously at me.
“No but really Mummy: what's his real name?”
Walking back from Big School yesterday afternoon, the Small Girl too was full of questions:
“Mummy?” she asked
“Yes Sausage?” I replied.
“What lives longer, a camel or a polar bear?”
I thought for a minute, before replying “I have absolutely no idea, we'll have to ask Daddy's iphone” (the mysterious and magical Daddy's iphone being the definitive voice on even the most unanswerable of the Small People's questions)
She considered this briefly and then asked “Mummy, do you believe in Jesus?”.
“Ummm...” I stalled, taken aback (my mind still on the camels vs polar bears problem)
“Well, yes Darling: I believe that Jesus was a man who lived a long time ago, and that the Bible tells the stories from his life”. The Small Girl had skipped ahead as I was speaking.
“But I don't really believe in the magic stuff” I added quietly, and she stopped and looked suddenly up at me.
“I believe in the magic stuff” she said, nodding her head thoughtfully to herself.
“Well that's just fine” I said “because what people believe in is a very personal thing, and it's something that we each have to decide for ourselves; only you can decide what you believe”. I took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly and together, we walked back home pushing the Very Small Boy, who had fallen asleep in his pushchair; his favourite Batman figure clutched tight in his grubby little fist.
