I had a call from Thing 1’s teacher the other day. She wanted to discuss Thing 1’s inability to differentiate fantasy from reality.
I asked the teacher if her kids thought Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy were real. They did. This was different she said, because “all kids believe in them”.
Evidently she only had a problem with individual delusions. They interfered with a child’s ability to deal with reality. Why would you want to deal with reality?
Fortunately for three-year-old Thing 1, I think reality is overrated. Those who believe in things unseen are the only ones able to change reality. I consider it an important duty to instill a belief in the unreal in kids, even though I frequently get tangled in my own web of fabrications.
Like the day I went to pick Thing 1 up from a playdate, and her friend’s mom kept avoiding eye contact. A few days later she called to inform me that Thing 1 had grabbed her husband firmly by the hips and took a deep whiff of his butt.
You see, I’d told Thing 1 that when you lie, your pants catch fire. Then she witnessed me lying to a traffic cop. When my pants did not spontaneously combust, she confronted me. I explained that all lies are not created equally and the level of incineration depends on factors such as severity, frequency and intention.
Sometimes you get a little smoke rather than an inferno. From this story a shorthand developed. Whenever someone in our household lies, we warn them, “I can smell your pants”, or we simply wave a hand in front of our face as if dispersing smoke.
Back to the guy my daughter violated.
Apparently he was regaling the girls with a fantastical story about how he had performed some superhuman feat. The girls did not believe him, while he insisted he was being truthful. Of course Thing 1 had a foolproof way to settle the issue. She simply smelled his pants for smoke!
Then there is the litterbug story, which evolved from a misunderstanding. I am very strict about littering but I was puzzled at how utterly terrified of it Thing 1 was. It turns out when I told her not to become a litterbug, she misheard litter as little and took it to mean that if she litters she would turn into a little bug, a fate worse than death.
Too easy, right? It was begging for embellishment. So I elaborated that when you persist on strewing your trash all over the show Mother Nature eventually gets fed up with you and turns you into a little bug.
I was having so much fun with this tale that when a few days later I noticed a weevil crawling across our kitchen, I called her over to see a litterbug.
Little did I know at the time that we had an infestation of weevils. They were in the flour, spices, cereals, everywhere. Her next question rendered me speechless. She wanted to know why all the people who have been turned into litterbugs move in to our grocery cupboard.
Suggestions, anyone?
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