Darwin's Folly

So this morning I was driving into the city from Connecticut with both girls to attend a birthday party at the carousel in Central Park. After a somewhat excruciating exchange about evolution, which I will elaborate on further down, Lily fell into (blessed) silence for a few minutes until we went through the toll booth on the Henry Hudson Parkway. She has always been very interested in the Hudson River and almost always starts talking about it or asking questions about it on this drive. Today she said, "That's New Jersey over there, on the other side, right?"

"Right," I answered, turning up the radio just slightly. She had been talking nonstop for fifty minutes already. She knew it was New Jersey on the other side.

"New Jersey," she repeated. "Hmm. Do they speak English over there?"

For some reason this struck me as hilarious.

Now. Onto evolution. I am beginning to wonder if I have not been fair to our nation's glut of creationists. I am wondering if perhaps they turned from evolution after several aborted attempts to explain evolution to a four-year-old. "God made it, all of it, yes, even the dinosaurs," is certainly an easier explanation.

As was I, back in the day, and as are so many of her peers, Lily is really, really into dinosaurs. She likes to know the names of them, she is fascinated by the concept of extinction, and at least once a week, a propos of nothing, will come up with an essentially unanswerable, for me anyway, question about them. Or at least a really bizarre theory or observation.

At the height of her monologue this morning, on and on about how if she had been alive when the dinosaurs were she wouldn't have been afraid of them and how if there had been sidewalks when the dinosaurs were alive they would have left footprints in the wet cement the way dogs sometimes do, she suddenly interrupted herself. "Hey, Mama? When did the first person come alive, the very first one?" I was busy trying to find some song I even vaguely recognized on the radio, and I didn't hear the question the first time.

"Louder, please," I said, giving up and turning it off. I wasn't even recognizing the genres. She repeated the question, and I sighed. That's what I'd thought she'd said.

These are challenging moments in parenthood. One can take the high road, and attempt an actual, somewhat comprehensible explanation, which some of the parents I know do every time, or one can give a brief and conversation-ending response, sometimes deliberately incomprehensible, or change the subject dramatically, ideally to something like ice cream or slides. Lately, I have been trying to take the high road with Lily, which I have done off and on from the beginning, of course, but want to commit to now full force based on my constant nagging fears of her being shortchanged by my divided attention.

"You know monkeys?" I began, idiotically, I realized as I was saying it. "Apes, and chimpanzees, and gorillas?"

"Yes," she said, from the way, way back where her car seat is. I could see her in the rear view mirror, nodding her head enthusiastically. "And bears!"

"No, not bears." I said. "Well, kind of bears, at some point, but not really. Just think about monkeys." I went on for a while, introducing the idea of four legs to two, talking about hairy, furry bodies, and the benefits of opposable thumbs. At some point I wandered too far in the direction of cells. Eventually I wound down with a weird Ayn Randian testimony to humankind's ability to weld steel, build cities. "So that's it, sort of," I ended, with faux heartiness, feeling exhausted and slightly disoriented. I looked in the rear view mirror again. She was looking out her window, gazing out at the Hudson River. She'd asked a few questions. With the exception of her misperception that this had happened overnight, due to an age appropriate inability to fathom great leaps in time, I felt that she had actually understood quite a bit, to the extent that what I had said actually had made sense.

"Mama?" she asked. I braced myself. "Can I ever go to New Jersey?"