Just Stick a Knife in my Heart… And Twist

We were on our way home tonight from a soccer meeting. From the back of the car I hear Son#3 (Bones) say… “Mom… sometimes in my head, I cry for you.”

Me: What? Why do you cry for me?

Bones: Because I love you so much, I don’t want you to ever die.

Me: Oh. So when do you do this crying in your head thing?

Bones: At snack and play. (That would be in school.)

Well the whole conversation went downhill from there. I am just NOT the person they should be coming to when they are having some sort of spiritual crisis. I don’t know the answers. At all. I wing it and I do OK, but its going to come back to haunt me.

There were questions about how my grandmother died 2 years ago. Then questions on how THEIR grandmother died 5 years ago. Then what is a stroke? What is old age? Why doesn’t God protect us from disease? And on and on it went… and I just answered all the questions very matter of factly, but then… but then… I had two little sobbing boys in the back of my car. Son#1 was just listening, but Sons2 and 3 were now melting into two small salty puddles.

I was aghast.

I pulled in the garage and when I got out of the car, Bones hung around my neck, as if I were going to spontaneously combust right then and there and leave this earthly existence. Son#2 wasn’t doing much better. Imagine my husband’s surprise when in we walk and two of them are crying messes.

Blech. Sometimes the questions they ask are too deep for me. What fits right in my head would not fit in theirs. I need to just defer all these questions to their Dad.

And from where did this come? I wasn't thinking about death. Sometimes when I think real hard about something, they'll start asking about the same topic. For instance, one time I was reading and thinking about Judas and whether he was really a bad guy or just doing God's will, and my then 4 year old eldest looks at me and out of the blue says, "Mom, who is Judas?" See, that did NOT happen tonight. No thoughts of death. This just came out of frickin' nowhere.

They are fine now. When I went to kiss Son#2 goodnight his last words to me were, “Mom, I think I decided I want to die of old age. Maybe I could just be sitting there at my plate of syrup at breakfast and fall over.” And he imitated his face hitting a plate of syrup. (He eats waffles for breakfast.)

How did we get from crying mass hysteria “please don’t die and leave us Mom!” to “I want to die and have my face fall in a plate of syrup”?