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Cheryl Hughes: It’s All So Confusing

My Career As A Woman

Have you seen the commercial in which the little girl is interviewing the sports star?  She asks questions about the guy’s favorite color, favorite animal, his bedtime, his choice of hash browns or home fries and if he likes the dress she picked out for the interview.  He turns to the room of professional reporters and asks, “Why can’t you guys ask good questions like that?”

Children tend to be literalists.  It takes a few years to learn nuance and social diplomacy.  My husband, Garey had friends in Alabama who were expecting their first child.  They were all at a restaurant when a little girl approached the very-pregnant mother-to-be and said, “I know what you’ve been doing!” As the group held their collective breath, waiting to hear the child’s explanation, she said, “You’ve been eating watermelon seeds.”

The confusion is understandable.  Children look to adults to decipher the world around them, and adults often tell half-truths.   Add to that the challenge of learning to speak the language, and there are bound to be misunderstandings and misinterpretations.  When my daughter, Nikki, was a little girl, she was fascinated with dinosaurs.  It grieved her that they no longer wandered our planet.  Mere pictures of the giant beasts were so inadequate.  One afternoon, Nikki and Garey were going over new words on her Speak-and-Spell.  They came to the word “extinct.”  Garey used the word in a sentence, “Dinosaurs are no longer here, because they are extinct.”  Nikki became very frustrated with the information.  “But Dad,” she said, “If we gave them a bath, wouldn’t they not be ex-stinked anymore?”

Ask a question of a child, and you will get a straight forward answer.  They feel little need to include additional information.  My friend Gary B. has a precocious little nephew named Max.  Max is four years old, and he and his family live in Louisville.  On a recent visit to Bowling Green, Max was staying at the house with his grandmother while his parents were attending a social event nearby.  After Max went down for his afternoon nap, his grandmother decided it would be a good time to take a shower (she works nights).  When she emerged from the bathroom, there was Max, standing in the kitchen, looking at a brochure.

“What have you got there?” his grandmother asked.

“It’s my paper,” Max said.

“Where did you get the paper?” his grandmother followed up.

“From the lady at the door,” Max answered.

On further examination, the grandmother discovered that Max’s paper was a brochure from the “Tea Party” political affiliation.  The grandmother explained to Max that the same rules about not answering the door unless Mommy or Daddy was with him also applied to Grandma.  As Max was assuring his grandma that he understood, there was a knock at the door.  It was the police.

It seems that the Tea Party-woman had asked Max if his mommy or daddy was home.  Max had told her that neither of them was there, because neither of them was there.  She immediately called the police and reported a small child at home by himself.  

Grandma spent the next thirty minutes showing the police her various forms of ID and getting her background checked.  The entire debacle could have been avoided if only the lady had asked the right question: “Is your grandma home?"  

Kids are reminders that things are really pretty simple.  Only as adults, do we learn to muddy the waters.

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Comments

So true Cheryl, love it, the innocents of children.


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