Tragedy Isn’t In Her Young Vocabulary

The 9/11 attacks came precisely 88 days after my daughter Ailsa made her ceremonious entrance into the world. In fact it was that very day when she took her first bite of real food: strained fruit, I believe it was Heinz strawberries and apples. I remember through teary eyes realizing it was both hopeless and inappropriate to try to explain to her what had happened and how it changed the world in an instant.

Flash forward to last holiday season and the great tsunami in Southeast Asia. Ailsa was three-and-a-half and quite capable of a simple understanding of what had been inflicted on millions of innocent people on the other side of the world. Yet my wife and I didn’t say much to her at all about the massive tragedy. We felt that if she commented on the startling images flashing across the TV set, we would answer any of her questions but elaborate no further. It’s not necessary, after all, to have a firm grasp of unfolding history before your fourth birthday. There’s no sense in having that much misery to deal with.

Our feelings are much the same now about the post-hurricane devastation in New Orleans and the American South. As far as Ailsa knows or will know for the foreseeable future, Katrina is simply the name of a pretty girl who is utterly incapable of inflicting the least bit of harm on anyone. Rita, similarly, is a lovely woman’s name. All Ailsa understands about news shows - and most shows in fact - is that they’re not Dora, Caillou or Little Bear and we should return to one of those. With rare exception, we do.

Kim and I don’t believe we will ever rely on so-called expert advice to teach our daughter about devastation. While Kim reads Today’s Parent magazine regularly along with many articles on parenting - including right now on defiant four-year-olds – I am rightly or wrongly content to ‘sense’ when my little girl is ready to learn life’s hardest lessons. This approach only works, of course, if you pay close attention to your children and the signs they are putting out. We both constantly discuss what Ailsa is learning day-by-day and week-by-week. We look for signs that she is unhappy or not adjusting well to her routine and we adjust our teaching accordingly.

But sometimes I find it tough to adjust. I often get quite intense and emotional as I tune into horror stories unfolding across the globe and close to home. My behaviour is not at all what you’d expect from someone who’s spent five years covering the daily news. I’m not detached. My wife, though equally distressed as I am about death and destruction, doesn’t act on any urge to scream out. I sometimes do.

Sometimes I am too late in remembering that my angel will only sleep with her bedroom door open and doesn’t like it when mommy and daddy are upset. She doesn’t know what I’m acting out against. That’s my clearest clue that at the tender age of four, she simply doesn’t need to know that New Orleans will never be the same festive Mardi Gras city that it was when I partied there in 1993. She might never enter a calm lake again until adulthood if she was made to understand that a massive wall of water came out of nowhere right after Christmas last year and remorselessly washed away over 120,000 lives. It would be unimaginably scary for her to learn that a small group of angry men killed thousands of innocent people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania as she ate real food for the first time.

So we live on as a family without divulging to our youngest the complexities of devastation. Happily we refrain. Instead, and quite appropriately, we read her books that relate the inevitabilities of life on a junior kindergarten level. On these pages it explains that it’s okay to be scared and feel shivery when something unfamiliar is happening. It’s alright to be angry when you wanted to play with a toy and another girl took it first. It’s natural and even healthy to be sad when a beloved family pet dies.

As I write this all out and think about it with greater gravity, I understand more deeply that even I don’t want to know every last detail of the incomprehensible misery taking place in the world today. Well before the summer began, I ended my stint as an online news writer in Toronto. So I didn’t have to regurgitate the grisly details of the “Summer of the Gun” in the Big Smoke. Still I hark back to the previous years where I was the lone writer at the web desk when police made the arrest in the murder of 11-year-old Holly Jones. Months later, I was once again alone when Toronto’s finest tracked down their suspect in the Cecilia Zhang murder case.

In both cases, I couldn’t stop the tears. I wrote feverishly and could only halt the floodgates by looking upward every few minutes, or when a brutal detail in the story stopped my fingers from typing and my mind from thinking straight. I had to pull myself together quickly and keep on delivering the breaking news. As much as it sometimes hurt to carry on, that was the job.

Ailsa’s job, plain and simple, is to be a kid. When we tell her there’s no chocolate before dinner even though she really wants chocolate, she knows the world isn’t fair. That’s enough to deal with for now as September ends and her first month in junior kindergarten is completed. The happy girl with long blonde ringlets doesn’t need any more to think about. We could all use a lot less devastation to think about.