Four is a special number for me. My beloved’s birthday has several 4s in it, my FD badge has a few and, of course, my daughter is 4. When I was way younger, being four years old meant being innocent, pure and, well…naive. In most places on earth, you can’t even testify in court until you’re mature…like, uh, 5. So 4 is pretty young. I’ve never talked down to children…baby talk is best saved for the bedroom (that’s another story)…I believe children can understand plain English (or Spanish, or French, or Swahili) without needing a vocabulary of their own. But still…children are, well, not yet fully formed. Right?
So my spousal unit, at the dinner table, is asking one of her trademarked
probing questions…
“What do you think the world was like before you were born?” Dear Daughter ponders (briefly, as any four year old may be prone to ponder) and says “Well…”, then rolls her eyes, shows the palm of her hands and says “what do you think? Like, I wasn’t born, you know.”
Ok…Miss Practical…it was a baited question designed to illicit a cute response. Just play the game, I’m thinking. So I add “OK…when I was young, I thought the world was just boring, waiting for me to be born…” Somehow, in my man-mind, I thought this would get her gears grinding in the right direction and she would say Something Precious. She laughs, rolls her eyes again, looks at her mother in a conspiratorial woman-to-woman way and says “that’s just silly. Nobody was just waiting for you to be born!”
Just for the record, at least one person was waiting for me to be born…and probably even anxious about it.