The hardest thing

So Stellan and I are watching Steven Universe, which is the best thing that currently exists on television for children, especially boy children of my son’s age — it's disguised as your bog standard pokemon dragonball ninjago band-of-misfit-magical-heroes vs the forces of evil blah blah blah, except the magical heroes are all women, and that is never once mentioned or referenced as remarkable within the show, and the plots all end up revolving around jealousies and feelings of inadequacy and other complex unsolvable emotional dilemmas like the episode Stellan and I were watching which ends with Connie’s mother finally acknowledging her overprotectiveness and accepting her daughter’s newfound personal agency and sword fighting skills. Whoah, said Stellan.

I said parenting is hard sometimes. (Which is a thing he and I have discussed. I’ve admitted to him that sometimes we have to make it up as we go along and hope for the best, a concept which he considered soberly and with a certain amount of awe.)

Stellan said Yeah. More than I realized. And thinks for a minute and then asks What was the hardest thing?

His mom tells him a story from when he was a tiny baby and had pneumonia and they had to give him a chest X-ray. (He raises his hand to request a detailed explanation of pneumonia. X-rays are already a familiar concept.) Because you can’t tell a baby they need to hold still they had to sort of put you in this machine which holds you still and you were afraid but we couldn’t explain to you what was going on. Stellan bursts into tears and says please don’t ever tell me or remind me of that story ever again.

It wasn’t because it was scary, it’s because we couldn’t explain why it was going to be scary and why it was going to be okay anyway. That was the hardest thing.