Dublin Opinion

The other day my four year old daughter surprised us when she pointed out a winged creature in a Scooby Doo screen saver on our PC and said ‘look, a terradactyl. Sure enough, there was a Scooby Doo style ‘scary monster’ much like a terradactyl, although one suffused with green phosphorescence, for some reason.

‘What’s a terradactyl?’ I asked.

‘A dinosaur, of course’ she replied, admittedly after a moments hesitation, which looked like she just wanted to check the fact with herself before speaking.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that she knows the names of specific dinosaurs, or at least one of them. Perhaps all four year olds can to get to grips with four syllable dinosaur names, but its forgotten later on, mainly because the brain becomes overstuffed with details about Paris Hilton or whatever celebrity is the big noise once she is old enough to care.

It’s an indication to us, her parents, though, that she is capable of understanding more complicated things. One such thing that I’ve noticed recently is the concept of death.

Now, all of sudden, her toys are not sleeping, they are dead, and this situation is announced with a sort of relish. My instinctive reaction though is to try to protect her from this grim fact of life. So, whenever it comes up, I try to brush it away.

Recently, for example, there was her little Piglet toy lying in a tiny heap on the floor, with herself standing over it. I was told that piglet had just died and my reaction was to say ‘Ah no, he’s not dead, he’s only resting’. ‘No’ she said, very definitely, ‘he’s dead’. Of course, for the game to continue Piglet had to rise again, Lazarus like, in order to go through the process of dying repeatedly. So it goes.

Rather than worry that this is indication of sadism I put it down squarely to the fact that kids like the playing dead thing. Her awareness of it, however, is more sophisticated than that.

Another example: I was given a six month subscription for History Today by my Father-in-Law, so every month for the past while I’ve been getting a copy of the magazine in the post. On the front cover of the April edition there was a coloured medieval illustration of Thomas Becket being murdered by four knights. She noticed the cover, pausing as she passed it on her way to bed and asked me what the men in the picture were doing.

Again, I dealt with it in my usual way, by lying. I said that the men were tickling the priest.

‘With swords?’ she asked.

‘Oy’, I thought. Then persisted in my liefest: ‘they’re not swords, they’re pointed sticks. It’s his birthday (as opposed to his death day) and they’re playing a game with him.’

Then she pointed to the blood trickling down from his tonsured pate. ‘That’s not blood’, I said, graspingly, ‘that’s er, juice. They’re pouring red juice on him and tickling him with pointed sticks. Did I mention it was his birthday?’ She seemed skeptical, at first, but then accepted it. As she trotted up the stairs to bed, though, I felt guilty. Surely it was more beneficial to discuss this issue honestly. I wondered how other parents deal with it.

Anne Enright is a parent who has no such qualms, or rather is the parent of children who seem quite comfortable discussing death. In a wonderfully written essay, though I suspect some literary license, she describes her children’s understanding of religion, specifically in relation to suffering and death.

“Last year, when she was five, my daughter announced that she was going to become a Muslim.

‘It’s an awful lot of washing,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, I am able to reach the sink with my feet.’ She went up to her room and stuck six sheets of paper together to make a prayer mat. It was time, I decided, to send her to Catholic Instruction. This is an after-school class that, besides fulfilling her tribal spiritual needs, provides a solid half-hour of free childcare, every Monday. It is conducted by a catechetics expert in lace-up shoes who looks like she means business. When I drove my daughter home after her first class, she was quite unhinged, muttering like an old gossip and quietly raving in the back of the car.

‘I didn’t know he was arrested,’ she said.

‘What? Who?’

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I knew they killed him all right. I just didn’t know they arrested him first.’

Hot news. It is still a great story, it seems. Besides, the child has what might be called a religious temperament, being prone to bliss and rendered solemn by the sacred. I used to think that all children were like this, but her brother is a much more pragmatic, ironic sort of guy. He doesn’t believe or disbelieve things as much as look at them to see what they might do next. Even so, there is one tenet he holds dear, and that is the resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ. He is adamant that there is one living creature who, unlike everyone else who ever lived, did not have to stay dead, once he had died. My son is three. He is on a bad mortality jag. Our summer holiday was spent driving these two young people around Brittany, looking for a toilet and talking about the grave.”

I quoted that much because its rich in detail and witty.

Enright is, in my opinion, a very fine writer. Her kids though, by this account, are another piece of work entirely.

Her eldest, the daughter, insists that they stop regularly at churches as they make their way across France during their driving holiday. She’s five and she wants to stop at churches?

However, while they make their way through one medieval sacristy, with the forms of previous churches embedded within its walls and embedded with it, the insignia of death: the remains of the early churches were like ‘a charnel house of dancing skeletons and rows of skulls’

‘Are they dead?’ her three year old son asked. ‘Yes, they are dead.’ She replies.

His mother then continues in the piece:

“My son is completely anxious and completely happy. I look at the roof beams and think, quite inaccurately, that the late medieval mind was very like a three-year-old’s; death was where Europe had got stuck.”

Enright then suggests, partly ironically, that the Renaissance ridded us of our superstitions and our fears. The Renaissance which brought us, in a series of wonderfully engineered linked bridges, right into the modern secular period. This modern age, in which a German pope can inform the world that Catholicism and Enlightenment Reason are twinned warriors, standing shoulder to shoulder against the medieval irrationality of Muslim fundamentalism. (For an interesting discussion on the Enlightenment, Reason and modernism vs postmodernism check out WorldbyStorm’s post on Cedar Lounge Revolution).

‘I can’t tell you how much I hate Catholicism.’ says Enright, after making the point about the pope. I can’t say I’m fond of it myself having thoroughly lapsed into atheism a good few years back. And I can’t imagine our daughter expressing much opinion with regard to religion, as it’s not discussed much at home. My wife though remains a Church of Ireland person, although not practicing at present. For this reason she likes that our little girl has prayers read to her every night from a book given to her by her grandparents. She joins in by saying Amen at the end, although usually she tries to say this as silently as she can. She picks out the prayer and I read it to her, even though even death stalks these mild pages.

There’s one pray which comes out with the immortal phrase ‘….thank Jesus Christ, Our Lord who died for us.’ When reading this I baulked at the D word, again irritated by my initial prudishness, and read ‘who lived for us’. I closed the pages of the pastel coloured book and instead reached for another story to get her off to sleep.

This one was about a dinosaur. A brontosaurus rex who wanted to be a terradactyl. Using palm leaves for wings and a coconut beak he succeeded, but came a cropper when he messed with a T-Rex. When I got to that point in the story I asked my daughter what the T stood for. ‘I don’t know’ she said, ‘what?’ ‘Tyrannosaurus’, I said. Can you say that?