My 5-year-old catches me by surprise with something he says pretty much every day. Most of the time it's funny, like the time he said he wished he was a "knock-turtle" so that he could stay awake all night.
But then there are times like tonight when he says something that just takes my breath away. He's been learning about Martin Luther King Jr. in his kindergarten and they obviously left out some of the tougher parts of the lesson. Here's our conversation from the dinner table tonight:
I wanted to cry and wrap my arms around him and protect him from all the horrible things in this world. But at the same time, I want him to know the truth. That some people are really bad people, but not as many as there used to be. That some black and white people don't get along, but these days most of us do.
Being as nonchalant as I could, I tried to turn it into a teaching moment. When he said, "But black peoples and white peoples are together now," I said, "That's right, because we're all the same, but we have different colored skin." Then he asked, "But are there other kinds of colors of people?" And I said, "Well, yeah. Asian people, like people from China, they kind of have yellow or tan skin. And Mexican people, their skin is kind of brown isn't it?"
By then, I started to kind of lose him, but he got the point. He said, "Like there's black dogs and white dogs and black-and-white dogs and brown dogs and they all get along." And I said, "Yeah, that's right." But then it devolved into a discussion of cats trying to get along with dogs, and cats eating mice, but they shouldn't and so on.
He's 5 years old. He has only so much stamina for these kinds of things. It does make me a little worried about and excited about the conversations we're going to have at the dinner table in a couple of years.
I can't wait to see what kind of insights he comes up with then when he's had a little more exposure to the world -- both good and bad. So far, I think he's turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.
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