Listening to Scooby

I’ve spent some time recently thinking about my daughter. As in, lying in bed, staring into the dark, really pondering who she is. She is my child, so she is half “me,” genetically. But she is six years old, so her character, the person who she will eventually metamorphose into (okay, yeah, I did it; I resorted to the butterfly analogy in the very first paragraph, how lame) is a long way off.

We call her “Scooby,” or “Scooby-Doo,” which is a play on her informal name, Libby, and its baby-talk offshoot, “Libby-Dibby-Doo.” She is smart – both intelligent and savvy – but she already does that “girl” thing where she won’t reveal quite how far ahead of you she is, keeping just a little bit in reserve. Years from now, this tendency will help her win ninety-nine percent of all arguments she engages in. She’s not a deep thinker, like my oldest son. By that I mean that just about every thought that goes through her head detours out of her mouth. She combines random ideas as if they actually go together and make sense, and then drops them into conversations. And perhaps they do make sense in her world, a universe in which there are no periods, only semi-colons.

Two weeks ago, I was teaching a Sunday School class. I have the lower elementary grades (kindergarten through second grade), and Scooby is one of my students. We were talking about the Ten Commandments, and I had struggled mightily during the previous week to find some innocuous way to explain “Thou shalt not commit adultery” to a bunch of first and second graders. After much prayer, I came up with: Keep your marriage promises. I explained that being married is like being on a team, and you want your team to do well. What if you decided that you liked another team better, so you stopped trying your hardest for your teammates and helped the other team instead? You’d be breaking your promise to your team, right? Heads nodded; they got that.

Phew. We moved on to the last Commandment, “Thou shalt not covet,” or as we paraphrased it, Don’t want something that belongs to someone else.

And here’s where Scooby’s synapses randomly fired. She raised her hand and said, “If you want something that belongs to someone else, like a wife, then you’ll break your marriage promises.”

Did I mention that she’s six?

Now, this isn’t an Oh, my kid is a genius! essay, although I wouldn’t rule that out completely. Only time will tell. No, it’s a reminder to me how much is inside that kid’s head already, and how little I listen when it comes out. Because I’ll admit that in the seconds between her hand shooting up into the air and my calling on her, I was thinking about how much more of the lesson we had to get through before we ran out of time, and were we going to be able to do the craft I’d prepared, and I hoped these kids didn’t feel like I was always calling on her to answer because she’s my daughter, and . . . . Everything except, Hey, maybe she has an insight of her own regarding these important tenets I’m supposed to be teaching.

I’ve been thinking about this off and on for two weeks. How often do we silence our kids, not because we’re not interested in what they have to say, but because we think don’t have the time to sift through what they’re actually saying? I’ll admit it; I do it a lot. (I have three kids, two ears, and one overwhelmed brain trying to process it all. Oh, and a husband who talks sometimes, too.) My heart sinks whenever I hear the phrase, “Oh, Mom, guess what . . . ?” because I know that I am in for a lengthy verbal treatise that will take more concentration to follow than I possess. Sometimes, not always, I’ll let her meander to the point, but, shamefully, more often, I interrupt in an attempt to get her to the finish line more quickly. I have my gentle ways of doing this (I’m not a monster): I suggest that she eat her food before it gets cold; I point out that I need to concentrate on my driving; or if I’m desperate, I tell her she’s “talking just to hear herself talk.”

I need to stop that.

Sometimes, as I commute in to work on the train or bus, I watch toddlers. There they sit, strapped into their strollers, gazing around at the different objects and faces. Pre-verbal, they have no names for what they’re seeing. How in the world do they process any of it? It’s not like they’re thinking, Oh, that lady is reading a book and sipping a cup of coffee. They have no vocabulary for any of that stuff. Without language, what goes through their minds?

The theory that I came up with when my kids were babies is that children come into the world just knowing everything. They are close to the angels, and when their eyes track across the room and they burst into laughter for no reason (what we called body joy), it’s because they are conversing with heavenly bodies. They’re in on the universal joke. As they grow older and rely more and more on language, they lose that connection, until they are completely verbal and as clueless as the rest of us. Babies hold the cure for cancer, the physics of traveling faster than the speed of light, and the solution to the crisis in the middle east – they just can’t tell us. And by the time they can explain stuff, they’ve lost the plot.

Anyway. From time to time, our kids tap into that instinctive insight and, while it may take them a while to get there, they just say stuff that makes you pull up short.

On Friday, I took the younger two to a Disney on Ice™ event. We poured out of the stadium along with a crowd of thousands when it was over, heading to the subway. It was pouring rain, and the wind made it almost impossible to hold the door to the station open. It was after nine o’clock, and I pushed the kids inside, hurrying them along toward the escalator. Scooby stopped abruptly, much to my dismay, and held out her hand. In her palm were some coins, two dimes and a quarter, I think, which she had found in her coat pocket.

“I want to give them to the man,” she said. I impatiently asked her what she was talking about, and she pointed to the homeless guy with a cup, standing just inside the double doors. “Fine,” I snapped, and stepped out of the stream of people, convinced were were about to miss our train. Under my eye, she made her way to the man and dropped her coins into his empty paper cup. He said something to her, and she gave him a brilliant smile. I took her hand as we rejoined the crowd, and probably walked a little bit faster than her legs could comfortably go.

As we stood on the platform, waiting for the train, she turned to me and said, “The man was really happy that I gave him money.” She paused and added, “I’m glad I didn’t spend it on a toy.” The tired part of my mind almost pointed out that her forty-five cents wouldn’t have been enough to buy anything anyway, but then I heard what she was saying. I looked around at the stupid crap people had been induced to buy: plastic mouse ears, light-up toys, mini-replicas of the characters of the show. Stuff that was destined to end up under the bed or in the trash in a few days’ time. How depressing it must be to someone who has nothing – no home, no bed, no food, and no warm place to be in the middle of a February rainstorm except a public train station – to be worth less to the hundreds of people walking by than a dumb toy. To Scooby, those two disparate ideas, the licensed Disney products and the homeless man, were connected by a semi-colon, not separated by a period.

Scooby is six. She’s still closer to the secrets of the universe than she is to clueless adulthood. Sometimes I think she still hears angels’ voices and from time to time, she lets me in on the conversation. I just need to listen.