I was one of those moms who didn’t talk “baby talk” to my child- ever. I started reading to him while he was still living in my belly and I spoke to him with big words in a normal voice from day one. Maybe he didn’t hear me before he was born, but I learned a lot about children’s literature so it was all good. And I know he didn’t understand the big words to start off with, but he was a new born and couldn’t understand any words, so he might as well hear intelligent ones!
Jon and I have had lots of really great conversations over the years. I would rather have a conversation with him than most anyone I know. He might not have understood words as a newborn, but now as a journalist, words are his life. And I will take a little credit for that since we read and discussed ideas his whole life. I took him to plays early on, of course. He was always a fairly quiet, thoughtful kid. We took him to see his favorite play, RENT, when he was just eleven years old. I had done research and we had listened to the music ahead of time. We discussed the themes and he knew the whole soundtrack by heart before we ever got to the theatre.
Many times I have heard people talk about what they keep from their children and I realized that I was probably a terrible mom because I told him pretty much everything. As I am sure you can tell from this blog I have few secrets. I think if you don’t tell people stuff, they will just make something up! I remember the one time years ago I decided to keep something secret, a little surgery I was having. I had to take four weeks off from work so substitutes had to be found, etc. But I thought that perhaps in a work environment I should keep the particulars to myself. One day I was walking by the supply closet and heard two coworkers talking about the horrible cancer I had. Of course, that was totally wrong, but since they didn’t know the truth they just made something up!! So I will tell you anything about me. (I can keep other people’s secrets, I just don’t see anything I do as being worthy of hiding!)
When Jon was about 12 I was telling him something about a family member and midway through I remembered the other moms talking about all of the things they would not tell their kids. I stopped mid-sentence, looked Jon in the eye and said, “Does it bother you for me to tell you things like this?” And he looked at me and said, “If you don’t tell me then how will I know not to say the wrong thing? How will I know what is happening to my family? How will I know what to pray about??”
This past week we found out some medical problems that my mom has, things she was oblivious to before. While investigating one set of symptoms we found something else entirely. It is something that at her age they really aren’t willing to chance doing anything about. And so now she has to live knowing that she has this issue and that it could blow up in her face at any given moment. She has been sent home for whatever time she has left, 20 minutes or 20 years according to the doctors. I started thinking about knowing things. I kind of wish she didn’t know about this. If nothing is going to be done, then I know she will just sit and worry about it. I would as well. I inherited her worry gene! If she had just gone home oblivious, resumed her days of TV watching and cat petting she might have been better off. Is it better to know or not to know? Should we be told everything?
When I had my tonsils out as an adult, they wanted to keep me in the hospital overnight. I was in a double room with a woman having heart surgery the next morning at 5am. They rolled in a TV/VCR the night before and proceeded to show her (and me too, unfortunately) a movie of the surgery she was about to endure. I do not want to see that! ( I also did not want them waking me up at the crack of dawn when they came to get this lady for surgery, so I asked my doc if I could go home. Being one of my husband’s old fraternity brothers he let me go if I promised to stay in bed!) There is a reason I am not in the medical profession! And there is a reason they put you to sleep! I do not want to know! Seeing videos of child birth in our classes totally freaked me out! I don’t want to see that! (It was during the childbirth video that I wondered why I had ever decided to have kids! I was terrified from that point on. If we had skipped the video I would have been fine!)
There are so many unknowns in this world. Being a control freak, I try to stay ahead of the game and know what my next move will be. That is usually when life blindsides you with something too wonderful to imagine or with something shocking. But that makes life interesting. How much do you really need or want to know about your future? If you could do something about it, then by all means give me a heads up so I can make a choice. But if there is nothing that can be changed, do I really want to know? In this world of so much information and social media, do we know too much?
