Fat fairies, God’s outfits & gay vilification. Awkward!

Here’s something they don’t tell you in the parenting books: the most important conversations you’ll have with your kids will be in the car. While driving. That’s when they’ll choose to mess with your head, throw you their curliest questions and make their most jaw-dropping observations. This will be both good and bad.

Good because from the backseat, they can’t see the panic in your eyes. Bad because when you’re freaking out, it can be hard not to crash into a tree.

I’m not talking Great-Wall-of-China type questions. No need to pull a rabbit out of your glovebox for those. That’s what Google and smart phones are for. Just pass your iphone back to your tech-savvy kid who will be able to find the answer they need before the lights go green. The true challenges are your more esoteric dilemmas. Birth, death, religion, politics, sex. All the topics that make a dinner party lively but not ideal to discuss with a six-year-old while trying to remember whether you’re passing through a 40km hr school zone.

When you’re confronted with explaining Big Issues, the responsibility of being a parent weighs heavily because you’re meant to have the answers and often you don’t. Not when put on the spot, anyway. These are the times when you can almost hear the drum roll as the universe waits for you to bugger it up and wreck your kid’s life. That’s how important it feels. The consequence of the wrong response is, naturally, a lifetime of therapy for your child. NO PRESSURE. Add a moving vehicle to the equation and it makes for some merry hell.

Whenever I’m faced with one of those drumroll moments, there are two images that flash into my head. One is of Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper, an angry skinhead roaming the streets causing mindless havoc. The other is of my child as an adult, lying on a couch while talking to a therapist. Both images fill me with dread. Given that my view of therapy is not a bad one (as I wrote here last week), I should clarify that it’s not the therapy that disturbs me but rather the idea that the root of all my child’s future problems will be traced back to this one conversation where I stuffed it.

Every parent has a Car Conversation that is seared in their memory. Like the friend who was driving her 7-year-old home from school as they casually chatted about his day. It was the usual stuff. Why he wished he could have had a Vegemite sandwich instead of cheese and lettuce. How much he’d enjoyed PE. And then this. “You know, Mum, at lunchtime, Ruby came up to me in the playground and said she’d heard a rumour I was gay.” Pause. “So I called her a lesbian.”

Hello tree? I’m coming for you.  My friend says: “I was torn between bursting out laughing and delivering a stern lecture on the evils of homosexual vilification.” She went with a diligent attempt at the lecture which went really well if her intention had been to dig herself into a really big hole. “Sweetie, you know, there’s nothing wrong with being gay.” “But Mum, I’m not gay.” “Well, OK, but we absolutely must not call someone gay or lesbian in a mean way.” “But Mum, you said there was nothing wrong with being a lesbian so why does it matter that I called her one?” “Because…”

Try explaining your way out of that one while operating heavy machinery. I dare you.

Another friend’s 5 year old daughter piped up with this pearler from her booster seat, apropos nothing: “Dad, what does God wear?” Anyone? Ingeniously, he reached for the emergency parenting technique called Answering A Question With Another Question To Buy Some Time. “Um, well, when you think about God, what is he wearing in your mind?” Nice save. And be extra happy she didn’t ask you about Richard Dawkin’s theories on atheism.

A few months ago, while driving home from a Fairies concert, it was my turn. Basking in the happy glow of some mother-daughter time, I was blind-sided when my three year old piped up from the back seat, “I think the green fairy looked a bit fat.”

Gulp. As I tried focus on the road, my voice inadvertently raised a few octaves as I gaily replied, “Oh no she didn’t, darling!”

“Yes, she did. In her tummy. Maybe she was pregnant.”

Dear lord, are we there already? Am I really having a conversation with my daughter about body image? At three? While simultaneously trying to follow my sat-nav? By the way, the fairy she was referring to was about a size 12. Not fat. Not pregnant.

“No darling, I don’t think she was fat at all! I think she looked LOVELY!” And then? I found myself uttering the following words, my voice borderline hysterical with desperate enthusiasm and fervent passion: “You know, fairies come in all shapes and sizes!”

At that point, she shut down and didn’t want to talk anymore and I was ready for some therapy of my own. And a parking spot.

What are the trickiest questions you’ve been asked by kids? How did you handle it?