Vol. 56 - Whose Country is it Anyway?
On belonging, understanding, and a little bit of soccer.
Let’s go back to last week’s newsletter; the short about my five-year-old son thinking that every language that isn’t English is French.
It was a funny moment and one that only a child could come up with because kids’ brains work in fascinating ways.
But for Emily and me, the moment didn’t end there with a laugh and canned audience laughter, closing credits rolling over a freeze frame of our perfect sitcom family.
(perfect. ha.)
Because after that moment ended, our son asked why, if they weren’t speaking our language, were those people here at all.
It’s a perfectly reasonable question to pop up in a five-year-old’s mind and one that, as we do with all of the tough ones we’ve thus far encountered (mainly death, love, and why having too many toys might not be a good thing), Emily and I approached as with as much honesty as we could.
One of the driving principles behind the parenting style Emily and I have chosen is that adults don’t give enough credit to kids’ emotional intelligence. And considering as much, we try to approach these conversations with as much truth and honesty as we can. Because they do get it. They get so much more than we often give them credit for.
Our son knows his grandmothers are dead and he knows he’s never going to meet them. He knows that his parents love each other even though they fight sometimes because he knows that people fight sometimes. He knows that too many toys isn’t the best thing for a little boy.
Does he know how cancer killed our mothers? No. Does he know what the underlying emotions and motivations of a fight thirteen years into a relationship are? No. Does he understand that having too much of something leads to a disregard for that thing? Doubtful.
Kids don’t have factual knowledge. But that doesn’t mean they don’t understand things.
And so, in an effort to explain to our son that the people in that restaurant had every right to be there, regardless of what language they spoke, Emily and I went on a long ramble about how people have the right to be wherever they feel safe and about how while, yes, English is America’s unofficial language, there is no requirement to speak it here, just as there was no requirement for us to speak French when we were in France or Italian when we were in Italy. We explained how we, as descendants of Europeans immigrants, may actually have less right to be here than those descendants of North Americans and how we’re technically living on stolen land that we proudly claim is our God-given right. I explained how, in perhaps my most radical of beliefs, I’m opposed to national borders, to the bureaucracy of travel, and believe that humans should be allowed to move freely the world over. I explained some of my complicated feelings about America; how this country became so prosperous because it was built of the back of centuries of free labor; how we abandon our weakest and our sickest in favor of profit; how, despite all of that, I still love so much about this place and am proud to be of here. And I explained to him how that deep-rooted love of country has much to do with that fact that I am straight and white and was born into the middle class; that that love of country may not exist for people who’ve spent their lives in the margins, and rightly so. I may have even told him that we humans have no more or less right to any piece of land on Earth than any bug, bird, or reptile, which is why I only kill the insects or snakes that might harm us or make us sick (also roaches. Fuck a roach).
Because kids have a lot more emotional wherewithal than we give them credit for and we trust that our son will understand a good bit of what we’re saying.
What kids don’t have is an attention span. Which is why, after Emily and I were satisfied with our thoughtful and thorough responses, after we gave each other obnoxious self-satisfied looks, after we thought to ourselves, “Yeah, you got this shit, dad/mom,” our son, who by then was deeply enthralled by the soccer game playing on the restaurant’s television set, asked which team was winning.
The blue team was.
“Oh,” he said. “I want the blue team to win.”