When Kyd was smaller, we were in a 700 square foot apartment without cable for a few months. Kyd and I regularly escaped to the suburban quiet of my mother’s house, or at least to the urban playgrounds and libraries closer to our temporary lodgings.
When the rain poured down in sheets, I turned to our trusty friend – the DVD player. At the time, Jimdear carefully skipped past the opening scene in Kyd’s favorite flick, Finding Nemo - the scene where the Bad Fish devours Nemo’s mom and all of his potential siblings in their eggs.
At the time, I thought it was silly. But I found myself starting the movie one scene later, too, and now that Kyd has discovered Babar, I’m glossing over yet another maternal demise.
I’m just not ready to explain the horrors of the world to my toddler.
I don’t remember edited versions of anything as a child. But then, I vaguely recall falling asleep during a viewing of Bambi at the drive-in. If it had been available 24/7 in our home theater, would I have worried more about hunters taking out my mom, too? As for Babar, it is possible that my mother omitted the gory details, too. I recall the future Elephant King meeting the Kind Old Lady, but not the bits about his mother dying.
Still, it strikes me that maybe, possibly, I’m going too far. I also skip the part about how the current Elephant King eats a bad mushroom and meets an untimely demise, thus clearing the throne for Babar.
Surely that wouldn’t traumatize my child. Would it?
I let Kyd play Guitar Hero, but I won’t tell him that elephants die. Am I really protecting him from anything?
Maybe this isn’t about him. Maybe this is about me and what I don’t want to talk about.
My father died when I was 14 going on 15 – by unhappy coincidence, his funeral coincided with my birthday. Kyd knows that people come in pairs – sort of – and asks about his Grandpa from time to time. Despite my own fractured faith in eternity, I tell him that Grandpa is in heaven.
But do I really want Grandpa to be spending eternity with the elephants drawings of Jean de Brunhoff and a Pixar Studios clownfish?
I can’t decide – is the death of cartoon characters a helpful way for children to understand that nothing lasts forever, or is it a painfully strange way to think about the very real losses that mar our lives?
You never completely come to grips with losing a parent, especially when it happens young. I want my father here every day. If anything, I feel his absence more as an adult than I ever did as a child. So many questions are unanswered – his stories, his preferences, his thoughts are lost, and they fade with every passing day. There are fictional characters I know better.
And so I don’t want Kyd to know that Babar and Nemo’s moms are gone too early. I can’t stand to talk about it – not because I find explaining the cruel realities of the food chain or the ivory trade impossible, but because I hate to even imagine the possibility that Kyd will grow up without both of us, or that we’ll eventually have to deal with more loss in our lives.
I don’t want him to know that fear before it’s necessary. And I’m not ready to respond to that fear, either. How can I, when it’s a constant presence for me, too?
