Becoming A Person, not just a Kid

Jack has taken to a new form of interview. No longer does he want to just talk to me about whatever. As a matter of fact, he has never been one to tell you much about himself or what he thinks or what he has been doing. Suddenly, though, I have become very interesting to him, and it is a little disconcerting if you ask me.

Last night, we went to see a movie called Inglorious Basterds. He asks me what movie we are going to see. I tell him. We go. We return. We walk loops around the cul-de-sac.

"What happened in your movie, mommy?"

Ok, now, this is going to be hard to see where the problem lies unless you have seen the movie. But you've all seen SOME Quentin Tarantino movie, haven't you? Can you think of ANY scene from any of them that would be appropriate to relate to my five year old? I have already told him the inappropriate name for this movie. And I quite liked the movie, myself. But it is in all ways totally violent and nothing I can tell him about.

So, I tell him some part about a fire, some part about nicknames, some part about how the germans do the sign for three differently than Americans. He loves this and practices the three and says we can now go to Germany. Then he looks at me deeply and says, "Okay, mommy, just three more things about the movie. Please."

I am perplexed. Never has he cared so much about what I have to say, and I do want to indulge him, yet this topic is just SO wrong.

And then today, he had an 'incident' at school in which he got upset because he thought he was being punished for bad behavior when he was not. It was not a big deal at all, but he got upset, and so his teacher told me he was upset, and he heard her. We get into the car.

"I don't want to talk about that."

Well, ok. We drive.

"Please tell me some things. Not about when or why I was upset. Please tell me something else about you."

Now, this is even worse. What in the world am I going to tell him about what we did all day. Sam watched TV while I cleaned the house and surfed the internet? So I tell him about 18 kids and counting and something interesting that happened on that show, and how Sam took a long time to fall asleep, and when he asks me for one more thing, I tell him about a graduate school I read about on the internet. He seems satisfied enough. Then we walk in the door, and he says:

"Mommy, I see this laundry here. You did not tell me about this. You must have forgot."

These types of things don't last long with him. But, it does make me think that he is a big boy now capable of understanding big concepts. And worse, he LOVES to try to grasp these types of larger concepts. The problem is just, how will I keep coming up with stuff to tell him?

I think I am going to have to stay up late and look up stuff on howthingswork.com.