Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Why Ask Why?

Posted September 07, 2007
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Maybe it's the heat wave that's softening our brains, but there's been an epidemic of Ghastly Explanations around here. And it's funny, because just recently in some parenting book or magazine, I was reading a little passage about how to answer young children's questions: simply, that's how -- more "The sun shines to keep people and animals warm and help all the plants grow" than "The sun shines because the nuclear reactions in its core fuse hydrogen into helium, converting over 4 million tons of matter into energy every second and producing neutrinos and solar radiation."

Of course! And yet. We're in the car, and Ben is wondering about what would happen if he planted a lemon seed and an apple seed in the same hole. "What do you mean?" I ask, and he says, "I mean could I grow apples that would never turn brown?" Now there's an interesting question. "If you could somehow graft the lemon's properties onto the apple tree, you could," is what I might say -- but don't. Hindsight leaves me with this advice: don't try detailing the principles of hybridity when you're also studying a roadmap and inserting a straw into a juice box, because you really don't know anything about hybridity, and it just might not go that well. It starts innocently enough, sure: I mention seedless watermelon; I mention pluots. But before you know it, I'm kind of running with it, sprinting in a lunatic direction towards genetic modifying, even though I don't know a single actual thing about genetic modifying.

Let's see," I say, and I'm racking my brain here. "I read something about it -- what was it? I think somebody tried crossing a snow crab with a tomato." It would help if I read more than the headlines of any given newspaper, but I'm trying to explain this anyway -- the idea that you could take a property from one species (the ability to withstand cold, say), and transfer it to another (tomatoes) and then you could end up with Frankenstein produce that stands up well to refrigeration. Only I'm also trying to point out the possible dangers -- all the while trying to a) figure out if 91 is really the best highway for us to take and b) blot the juice from my leg with a tissue -- and something goes wrong. "So you see," I conclude, "you could go out to pick your tomato, and there on the vine would be growing a weird juicy crab." There is silence from the back, and when I crane my neck around to look at him, Ben's face is a mask of horror. "That wouldn't really happen," Michael interjects gently. "Mama's just talking about the kinds of things they worry about."

I picture Ben thanking me one day, up at the podium accepting his Oscar for Tomato Crabs Killed My Only Son with Their Cold and Seedy Claws. Oy vey.

Other explanations go badly, but in a less dramatic way. We're in the car, for example (do you see a pattern here?) and the Fountains of Wayne song "Fire Island" comes on. The kids know and love this song, but suddenly Birdy wants to understand what it's about. "The parents go away for the weekend," I explain, "and the teenagers do naughty things."

"But why do they drink all the alcohol?"

"They're very naughty," I say. "It's a grown-up drink that's not really for them."

"But do they share it?" I love the way Birdy translates everything into her own preschooler idioms: sharing, sandwiches, babies. Every topic is washed clean by her innocence.

"Probably they do."

"How do they share it? Do they take turns?"

"Maybe they pass the bottle around and everyone takes a sip," I say, and only after Michael turns his head from the road in front of him to look at me do I realize that I'm having some kind of forest for the trees problem here. It's like I'm making a chain from gum wrappers -- first this one, then this, folding, attaching -- and I forget to see the bigger picture, which is that I'm chewing way too much gum.

But this is the same car ride during which Michael himself blows it: "Why doesn't all your blood pour out when you cut yourself?" Ben wants to know, and Michael picks the hole in our air mattress as his explanatory metaphor of choice.

"You mean last year?" Ben asks. "When all the air leaked out of it when we were camping and we were all of us flat on the ground by morning?"

"Oh right," Michael says. "So no. Not like that." I am suddenly remembering the time when I walked into the kitchen to hear the very tail end of some doozy of his: "... and that's why they call it cremation."

But it's truly contagious on this car trip, because Ben himself catches the explanation-gone-bananas bug. "Ben," Birdy says. "Ben, am I born?" And Ben, completely exasperated by the redundancy of her question, says only, neither unintelligently nor helpfully, "Birdy, if you can ask, 'Am I born?' you're born."

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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