2023-11-09 14:11:00
My son Jakob* is three years old. The question of how to bring serious things to him has been a point of friction between my husband and me ever since Jacob was able to ask questions. I have a strange tendency to over-explain. The classic question is, of course, where the meat comes from.
I would like to describe it in all the technical details, I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m self-conscious about my “unsentimental” view of things. Maybe because I really think it’s better not to fool the children, but simply to satisfy their natural interest in things as well as possible and, of course, in a child-friendly way. Maybe because I just enjoy explaining it in detail – and that would of course be terribly selfish. My husband, on the other hand, would prefer to hide the fact that birds of prey hunt rabbits. He doesn’t want such cruel images to be burned into our son’s memory so early.
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I imagined this kind of explanatory conversation before I had children. So I imagined giving my child answers to complex questions. In this way, I had long inner dialogues in which I justified the “why” and “how” of various things from the ground up. The directness and lack of presuppositions of children’s questions is the ultimate test of the conclusiveness of one’s own experience of the world. You are forced to really think everything through again.
Jacob asks many questions. They are often tricky. It’s often about “good” and “evil”. After my husband and I had one “ZDF Magazin Royale” episode about the right-wing extremist chat group excesses of Frankfurt police officers and were just in the follow-up conversation, Jakob heard the word “police” and urgently wanted to know what was going on. “Oh, you know,” I said, “not all police officers are nice.” Because of course I want him to assume that the nice police officer is the norm and that he can trust the police if he ever has a problem. “But there are also bad police officers, we just talked about that.”
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I noticed that this confused him. Ambivalences and gray areas are still developing for him; he prefers things dichotomously. Jakob usually forces me to play his current favorite children’s song classics while driving, but the other day he forgot, so we were listening to the news. I knew there was a risk that he was about to hear something that wasn’t good for him, but I left the news on, partly because of the eternal thirst for information of a mother of two very small children who immediately turns off any newspaper is torn from the hand and who tries to avoid prolonged reading on the smartphone – the radio is one of the few remaining sources of information. On the other hand, there was a bit of excitement as to whether he would ask questions. Fortunately, the main news story about the Gaza war was bloodless. It was reported, relatively neutrally, that “the Israelis” had now advanced so far into the Gaza Strip and were attacking Hamas positions.
“Mom, why does the man say Hamas?” Jacob asked, he pronounced it wonderfully in Arabic. I answered him, pretty recommended, as I found out afterwards: “They are really bad. They are currently being fought against. But that’s a long way from here, my darling.” He thinks fighting is great – combat robots, police, soldiers, Paw Patrol didn’t do it any better – he says: “And do they have to be removed?” Or something like that, I know no longer 100 percent, as he put it. I thought of my husband and the rabbits and the birds of prey and held my breath a little.
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I dodged the question, then he asked, “And what are Israelis?” I said, “These are the people who live in a country called Israel. That’s really hot. And now these are the soldiers who are fighting right now.” “The Israelis are fighting against the bad guys?” he asked, I said: “Yes, exactly, my darling, they are fighting against the bad guys.” Then I almost had to cry, because of the horrible situation, but also because my simplification, which was of course completely inadmissible, had opened up some crying space in my chest. Jacob and I both came out of this situation very satisfied, he, because he was finally dealing with a simple case of “good versus evil”, and so was I.
WELT author Hannah Lühmann
Source: Martin UK Lengemann/WELT
A few days later he took his daycare class on a trip to the Berlin Jewish Museum, which has a great children’s exhibition. I couldn’t concentrate all morning because I was afraid something would happen. The children’s exhibition, which is actually more of a huge indoor playground, focuses a lot on Noah’s Ark. He already knew the story from a children’s Bible that we recently bought him, but had apparently forgotten it again, or at least that’s what he told me upon returning from the museum as if he had just heard them for the first time.
He came to the place where God sends the flood to destroy all people except Noah and his family. “And then, Mom,” he said excitedly, “then the bad guys just swam away! Into another country!”
I almost had to cry again, this time because the Jewish Museum staff’s rewriting of the Bible corresponded exactly to our bedtime ad hoc rewriting that we had come up with when we realized while reading it that it was completely wrong is unbearable, such a God who wants to kill everyone.
“Yes, my darling,” I nodded enthusiastically. “The bad guys just swam away.”
* Name changed by the author herself
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