THE MAN

The most wonderful person in the world is ‘The Man’.

When my son was two years old, he went through a phase where he didn’t like to leave anything behind. He cried when we had to leave the flatbed at Costco, when we dropped off some plants at a friend’s house (much to the delight of the plants that now they stood a fighting chance), but the climax was when my husband, Steve had to leave his precious mountain bike (sorry, he wants me to add single track slayer to that description…) at a friend’s house to get a tune up.

Tyler would have none of that, it was daddy’s bike and no way were they going to leave it behind. Thus was invented ‘the man’. The man was going to fix the bike and we would get it back, but the man needed to have it right now. That satisfied the possessive nature of our son and that was the first sparkling of respect for this amazing man who could do such things.

Now, I am less creative than my husband and am more inclined to just tell my children the exact truth, that we are leaving the bike to get fixed so get in the car. However, creation of ‘the man’ has been our escape from explanation since then. Mostly ‘the man’ fixes or repairs things or is who is taking care of certain toys or articles that we had to leave at our last house when we moved here.

Thinking on the spot and getting creative with our children is a constant and necessary challenge. Trying to find a good balance between telling them the truth, because they are always much smarter than we give them credit for, and not burdening them with the whole complete truth that a two year old does not need to know. For example – the dog is going to live on the farm, when really, well, we don’t need to go there do we? The best explanation I remember reading was from Anne Frank’s biography when she asked her father about sex. He asked her to look at his heavy suitcase with all of his repair tools and said that he wouldn’t be a good father if he asked her to carry that would he – and she had to agree. Similar to that, he wouldn’t be a very good father if he asked her to carry all the knowledge about sex at such a young age so he would tell her in a couple of years when she was stronger. And this satisfied her.

I think of that story at times when I have to choose between truth or tale and hopefully I’ll give my children confidence that what I say is honest as much as I can and explanations are given, not on demand but on my judgment. Sometimes though, I just go for the most entertaining aspect. Must run now, we are having dinosaur eggs for supper…