Here’s something they don’t tell you in the parenting books: the most important conversations you’ll have with your kids will be in the car. While driving. That’s when they’ll choose to mess with your head, throw you their curliest questions and make their most jaw-dropping observations. This will be both good and bad.
Good because from the backseat, they can’t see the panic in your eyes. Bad because when you’re freaking out, it can be hard not to crash into a tree.
I’m not talking Great-Wall-of-China type questions. No need to pull a rabbit out of your glovebox for those. That’s what Google and smart phones are for. Just pass your iphone back to your tech-savvy kid who will be able to find the answer they need before the lights go green. The true challenges are your more esoteric dilemmas. Birth, death, religion, politics, sex. All the topics that make a dinner party lively but not ideal to discuss with a six-year-old while trying to remember whether you’re passing through a 40km hr school zone.
When you’re confronted with explaining Big Issues, the responsibility of being a parent weighs heavily because you’re meant to have the answers and often you don’t. Not when put on the spot, anyway. These are the times when you can almost hear the drum roll as the universe waits for you to bugger it up and wreck your kid’s life. That’s how important it feels. The consequence of the wrong response is, naturally, a lifetime of therapy for your child. NO PRESSURE. Add a moving vehicle to the equation and it makes for some merry hell.
Whenever I’m faced with one of those drumroll moments, there are two images that flash into my head. One is of Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper, an angry skinhead roaming the streets causing mindless havoc. The other is of my child as an adult, lying on a couch while talking to a therapist. Both images fill me with dread. Given that my view of therapy is not a bad one (as I wrote here last week), I should clarify that it’s not the therapy that disturbs me but rather the idea that the root of all my child’s future problems will be traced back to this one conversation where I stuffed it.