One of my most guarded secrets as a new mom, one that I swore my children would never uncover, was that as babies, they bored me to near vegetation. It wasn’t until they became elementary school-aged, when our conversations became deeper and more meaningful, that I started to fully enjoy being a mom.
Yesterday, we had one of those deep, meaningful conversations while driving home from summer camp.
Eva, who has posed more questions from her first word to present than during the entire length of the Spanish Inquisition, kicked off the discussion.
“If God made everything, who made Him?” she asked.
I figured now was just about a good time as any to blow apart everything she’s been learning in Catholic Sunday school for the past four years.
“Well, here’s the thing,” I began. “What you heard about God in Sunday school is just one religious point of view. I don’t think it’s some guy sitting in the sky with a robe and staff. I don’t even think it’s a man or a woman. I think it must be some kind of energy. Energy that every living thing is a part of. Kind of like the Internet, where everyone is linked into one giant network. Does that make any sense?”
She thought about it in silence for a minute or so, and then said, “But if God is energy, then who made the energy?”
“Yeah,” added Tyler, who sits between the two sisters to keep them from clawing a third nostril into each other’s faces during long car rides. “It’s not like the World Wide Web could have snapped into formation without Tim Berners-Lee.”
(Actually, my ten-year-old is nowhere near smart enough to come up with something like that just yet. But if he was, parenting would be even more stimulating.)
“Look,” I replied, “My opinion is just one of many. But you’re smart, so I know some day when you’re older, you’ll think really hard about it, and you’ll make up your own mind about how it all works. Lots of people wonder about who made God. It’s a chicken-and-egg question.”
“What’s a chicken-and-egg question?” was Eva’s next question.
“Well, what do YOU think came first? The chicken or the egg?” I challenged.
“That’s easy, she said. “The egg.”
“OK. Then who laid the egg?”
“A chicken,” was her immediate response.
“And where did the chicken come from?”
“An egg—” she answered, but stopped herself as soon as it came out.
“Are you starting to see?” I asked. “Where did THAT egg come from? No one has the answer to that.”
“Another chicken!” piped in Anna, smiling like she just snapped in the final puzzle piece of the JFK assassination.
“And where did that other chicken hatch from?” I started to think this could go on for a very long time.
“A egg!” she answered.
“Anna, it’s not A egg,” corrected Eva. “It’s AN egg. ‘Egg’ starts with a vowel.”
Like mother, like daughter. Able to conjugate a verb in twelve different ways, but doesn’t know nothin’ about nothin.’