War, enemies and the truth about Santa Claus

“Mom, is Santa Claus Really real?” Aiden asked me with such sincerity and concern that I was taken aback. Do I lie to him in the name of perpetuating a kid fantasy? Do I set him up for disappointment when he learns the real truth? Or should I just let him enjoy the fun of a mythical Santa (perhaps making it my own by, say, telling him the Norwegian/David Sedaris version of Santa as a giant Black man). Oddly, I just had no idea how to answer the question.

Then again, we've broached topics recently that have left me speechless.

For example, while shaving my legs in the bath the other night, Aiden came in to supervise.

What are you doing?

Shaving my legs.

Does it hurt?

No, only when I’m not careful and I cut my leg.

Cut your leg?!

This is a razor and it’s very sharp. It can cut your leg if you’re not careful.

Like Tim’s leg?

Sorry? What do you mean?

Like Tim’s leg? Did a razor cut his leg off?

Our friend Tim is a former Marine whose leg was blown off in Vietnam. He recently updated his prosthetic with a fancy contraption that probably cost about as much as my home. So now he likes to show it off, and Aiden is fascinated. Aiden heard that Tim stepped on an explosive device, but there’s no real place for that in the mind of a four year old. Might as well have been a razor that cut off the limb. In fact, the shrapnel probably functioned in exactly the same way. So we continue.

No, his leg was cut off by an explosion, though there may have been a piece of metal that was just as sharp as a razor.

So where is his leg?

I think it fell far away.

Did he go get it?

Well, Tim fell unconscious. He wasn’t able to.

What’s unconscious?

In some cases the body is so shocked it kind of falls asleep to protect itself. He didn’t wake up until he was in the hospital.

But where did his leg go? What happened to it?

Well, um... maybe animals ate it. I'm not really sure.

War is certainly a topic of our times, and a topic of my life, but answering questions with honesty and without inducing fear and horror is another thing entirely. What happened to his leg? It’s a perfectly logical question for a four year old. In later years we might ask, what happened to his soul – and how can we get it back into his body and into his heart? What do we do to repair the fabric of his mind? and thankfully he only lost his leg and not his life. But those aspects are too big and esoteric for a four year old. He wants to know, Why was there an explosion? Were they bad people? Why did they want to hurt him?

I wished I could call Tim and have him come over. Not that any of us have the answer to these questions. And none of us knows which detail might lodge into the mind of a young boy and stay there for years, maybe a lifetime. With Aiden’s mind and consciousness developing I think it’s important to start sharing information about the fact that some people aren’t so good, that some ideas aren’t so good, and that fighting is rarely if ever a way to solve problems. Fighting hurts people and guns hurt people, and when we aren’t kind to each other our words can hurt people. And is that really how we want to be with the people around us?

But what about enemies? he asks. What if we just hurt our enemies?

*

The other day in a café, a young man at the table next to us started asking Aiden about his new books. Within minutes, the two had gone through the I Spy booklet and with Aiden now climbing into the stranger’s lap had moved onto a Berenstein bear book warning children about how to avoid strangers.

The young man laughed under the weight of Aiden’s body, now reclined into his arm. “Yes, it’s important not to trust strangers,” he chuckled, looking at me. Always attentive to the subtlest of sentiments, Aiden climbed off of the man’s lap and came to mine. I read him the book myself, emphasizing that not all strangers were kind and that they could hurt him, and how he could yell if anyone ever tried to get him to climb into a car or otherwise lead him away. I felt sick by the end of it. Sick because I hated conveying that message but I think it’s important. I know that preparing my son for a life of war, caution and the possibility that there are strange people out there set on hurting him is what I need to do. But suddenly war seemed easier to explain. The absurdity of fighting was much easier to rationalize than the kind of illness that leads people to hurt children. Surely there is some overlap, but how do we know if someone is an enemy, and why should we spend any time or energy trying to define this? No one is our enemy, right?

But what about the people who took Tim’s leg? he asks.

Sometimes it feels too much and these topics of dangers and strangers, enemies and why there are wars, are not subjects on which I want to make too many mistakes. We go, we talk, we are gentle, and sometimes things slip. Like last night:

Why was she talking about the end of the world, mom? When is that?

There's no end of the world, honey. It all just keeps going. So yes, let’s ask Tim. Let’s ask him again about his leg.

(beautiful photo by the wonderful Jennifer Esperanza)