There are a
great many things about parenting that are easy to dismiss as hoary old pop
culture clichés until you go through them yourself and realize that some things
become clichés because they are universally true. Among these, I guess, you could count the new
parents’ utter lack of sleep or the desperation a dad feels when he JUST.
CAN’T. FIGURE OUT. why his infant son is crying non-stop. —
One thing I had
not predicted would impact my life in any way is stereotypical Kid Who Never
Stops Asking “Why.”
I’ve seen it in
movies. I remember a Robin Williams
routine from Live at the Met that had me peeing my pants at age 16, even though
I had not an inkling what the experience Williams was describing might be
like.
I do now.
My kid is three
and it’s been (another cliché) utterly amazing the way his mind has grown in
the last twelve months. The way he’s
gone from being able to name a few concrete objects to spitting out long,
complex sentences. The things we thought
he’d be too young to remember that come spilling out in conversation. The interesting way he’s developed the habit
of taking all of his toys–cars, animals, blocks–and using them to create a
surreal superhighway around the living room.
But this
everlasting gobstopper of “Why?” with which he hits me on occasion is the one
that throws me for the biggest loop. No
answer is deep enough. Every time I
explain something, he’s demanding that I explain the explanation. And then he finds that level of clarification
lacking and tosses another “Why?” on the fire. I douse that flame and then, like those annoying trick candles, he
springs back to it with a request for more information, please.
Maybe this
strikes me so because it’s fascinating to see his sponge-like brain soaking up
more and more information about how the world works. Or maybe I just feel inadequate to the task.
I remember
thinking, as a kid, that my dad had to be one of the smartest men on the planet
because he seemed to know just about anything I’d ask. (And my dad is a really, really smart man,
actually.) To now be faced with my own
depth of knowledge on numerous subjects is humbling.
Sometimes, I can
spelunk all the way down to the bottom of my kid’s “Why” cave and land safely
on the bottom. But other times, my information rope is woefully short and I
plummet to the bottom of the shaft and land with a thud, weakly mumbling, “I’m
not sure about that, pal.”
Maybe I need to
make peace with the fact that my kid’s not going to see me as the Smartest Dad
in the Universe. Perhaps I should
develop the 21st century habit of saying, “Why don’t you and I go look that up
online?” Or, possibly, this “Why” phase
won’t last forever and I’ll be able to go back to being able to shield my
intellectual deficits.
Also, I should
keep in mind that, some day, he’ll be a teenager, who just glares at me and
says, “What?”
“Why” isn’t so bad.
