The Mouths of Babes

One of my dad's favorite stories from my childhood was not my favorite - not because it was embarrassing, but, well, because he got it wrong.

When I was 8, we took an epic road trip, including camping at Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. I loved pretty much everything about that trip - the places, the animals we saw, using the brand new camera that my brother gave me, the keychains that my mom let me buy in gift shops.

One day, we drove by the carcass of a roadkill coyote alongside the highway. "Oh, that's poor old Wile E." my dad said, referring to the Warner Brothers cartoon character.

"No, it's not!" I said, outraged. I was eight years old, after all, and I could not believe that my dad thought that I was too little to realize that a cartoon character was fictional. Did he really think that I couldn't tell the difference between a cartoon that walked on two legs and mail ordered ridiculous weapons and a real live, very familiar animal? Our dog was half coyote! As the youngest child, I was very sensitive to any reference to me being "too young" to understand something. I tried very hard to keep up with the big kids.

My dad misunderstood my outrage. "Oh, no, you're right. I'll bet Wile E. is too smart to get hit. He's just fine," my dad said, fairly bubbling with mirth. He went on to talk to my mom, as if I wasn't right there in the back seat, about how adorable it was that I worried about Wile E. being safe.

Even at 8 (and younger), I knew that it was useless to correct him. He wouldn't believe me, for one thing, and he'd be offended at being challenged. So I rolled my eyes and let him chuckle.

It was just my luck that he was so tickled by this story that he told it over and over. Great, I thought. Now his friends and my relatives think that I'm a baby, with no grasp on reality. Fantastic. Prepare to be patronized. (I hated being patronized.) I did mention how it annoyed me to my mother, but she confirmed, "It's best to just let him enjoy the story, accurate or not." He died when I was 22, still telling the story. He loved that story, thought it was so cute. I never did try to set the record straight.

So, as a child, I knew that misunderstanding isn't always on one side, parent or child.

As a parent, I sometimes wondered what people were thinking when my kids said something that sounded ridiculous, but I knew was true. Sometimes, people would argue, even if the kids got it right. For instance, when my kids would say, "Santa doesn't come to our house," people assumed that we didn't celebrate Christmas, or that we'd had a severe financial hardship, or that my kids didn't think they'd been "good enough" to get any presents. What they actually meant was that Santa brought their presents to the family party, usually at my aunt's house.

Another time my kid got it right, but it sounded loopy, was after a theater company picnic. To celebrate the end of the summer season, the company always had a family picnic at a nearby lake. It's about an hour's drive away, but most of that hour is straight up into the Sierras.

One year, on the way to the picnic, we came across our friend's Volkswagen stopped on the side of the highway with its engine compartment open. We stopped and talked to Kahele, the bug's owner, and she said that the car was acting like it was out of gas, but it had half a tank.

"I'll bet it's vapor locking," my husband said, describing what happens when part of the engine is so hot that the gas evaporates before it can be utilized. The car was weighted down with passengers and several large, full ice chests. The combination of the climb and the load left the car struggling. My husband took the largest chest out and put it in our van, then scooped handfuls of ice onto the engine. "Try it now," he said.

The bug roared to life, and we followed it the rest of the way to the lake. It had no more problems.

A couple of weeks later, we went to a pool party for the same theater company. My sister's kids were visiting, so they got to come along. As we pulled up and parked behind the Volkswagen, my kindergartner announced to her cousins, "That's Kahele's ladybug. It had too much weight in it, and Daddy fixed it with an ice cube."

Well, pretty close! It still sounded like gibberish, but aside from the amount of ice, it was pretty spot on.

My son got lots of extra sympathy as an injured toddler, due to his linguistics. He rolled out of his toddler bed and broke his collarbone, at an age when he described everything that happened in the past as being "yesterday." Wearing his little sling with pictures of Snoopy on it, whenever anyone asked when he hurt himself, he'd say, "Yesterday," and they'd say, "OOOOHHH!" and fuss over him.

Of course, every person remembers and processes things differently, but occasionally, the way my child(ren) remembered something rendered the event unrecognizable.

When my sister got married for the second time, my 8 and 9 year old daughters hoped that they'd get to be flower girls. They were disappointed that even the bride's own daughters weren't getting to be in the wedding party, because they weren't having any attendants.

My sister and her fiance wanted a small wedding, and decided, after months of weighing options, to do a quick ceremony with a justice of the peace, and dinner at a hotel on the coast to celebrate. No invitations, no new clothes, no fuss. We all got phone calls - "I know you won't be able to make it, but we're getting married on Wednesday." As in, the coming Wednesday; as in, less than a week.

If we were to drive straight there (as our other sister did), it would take seven and a half hours. My husband was working 12 hour shifts, 3 am to 3 pm; he couldn't take time off on short notice unless it was an emergency. If we were to drive, it would mean three days - a drive day, the wedding day, a drive day home - and we didn't want to take the girls out of school for that long. Flying on short notice was expensive, but if only I went, it was doable. My eight month old could fly for free if he sat on my lap. So, my mother and I decided to fly; she rarely took any time off from work, but a single day off to see her daughter get married was worth it.

Since I was a stay at home parent, I'd have to figure out child care for the older children. If I could have flown straight there, it would be about 90 minutes each way, but the airport near my sister is a small, rural airport, and there were no direct flights from home. We'd have to fly for an hour plus to a large airport, have a layover, then fly for another hour plus to the small airport, which was still about 30 minutes from my sister's house, where we'd meet before driving to the courthouse. The flight I found that would get me (and my mother and son) there on time left at 6 am; we'd have to be at the airport by 5. With my husband at work at 3, that left my kids alone, which was unacceptable. I couldn't imagine asking someone to get to my house by 4 so that I could leave at 4:30.

My inlaws lived nearby, so I asked my mother in law if she could take the girls overnight, then get them to school in the morning. She had a spare room with twin beds, and was about 15 minutes away from their school. She agreed to take the girls, asking us to get them to her house by dinner time, so that by bedtime they'd be ready to settle in. Since they got out of school at the same time my husband left work 15 miles away, instead of having them walk home to an empty house, she'd pick them up from school, and my husband would come and get them from her house. "It's probably be easier if they just all have dinner here again, instead of Danny having to go home and throw something together on short notice," she said. After getting home, he'd then stay up past his own bedtime in order to tuck them in at their normal bedtime. We thanked her profusely for making the trip possible, and bought tickets.

It was a long day for us - up at 4, at the airport by 5, and we didn't arrive back home until almost midnight. Still, my mother and I got to be with my sister on her wedding day, I got to take photos, and my children were safe while I was gone.

A couple of weeks later, I was saying something about how stressful it was that the photo processor temporarily lost my sister's wedding photos - this was the days of film, and if the film was lost, they were gone forever. My daughter exclaimed, "You never told us that Aunt Lynne got married!"

"Of course I did. Remember wanting to be a flower girl?"

"No, you told us she was going to get married! You never said it already happened!"

"You knew when it happened. That was why you guys spent the night at Grandma Donna's - so I could go to the wedding."

"You WENT?"

"Yes. You knew that. That's why you stayed overnight at Grandma Donna's."

"We've never stayed overnight at Grandma Donna's!"

What? It had only been two weeks - how could she have forgotten? I assumed that her sister would set her straight. But one of the things that amazes and puzzles me to this day was the ability of these girls who bickered constantly to also think in lock step. One was convinced of her own infallibility, and one was anxiety ridden, so it was a fairly common thing for the force of one personality to overwhelm the other, but I'd never seen it to this extent before. Her sister took up the complaint - "You never told us! We never stayed at Grandma Donna's!"

That's weird, I thought, but I waited it out, knowing that one of them should eventually recall the event, if only to one-up her sister. We - the baby and I - had been gone for two nights worth of dinners and bedtimes. Grandma Donna had dropped them off AND picked them up from school. It just seemed impossible that they'd forget almost two entire days, even if they'd forgotten WHY I was gone.

Instead, as time went on, they embellished their tale of woe. They started telling people that I had dropped them at school, driven to the airport, flown to the wedding, attended the wedding - and, somehow, also dinner - but flown back in time to pick them up from school as if I'd never gone anywhere. They were convinced that I'd then tried to keep this a secret, and that they'd only found out by accident. Both of them were deeply convinced of this exact scenario. "And she won't even admit that it happened!"

At first, it was merely irritating, but then I started to panic. I know that people often repress traumatic memories - had something deeply horrible occurred at their grandparents' house, so terrible that neither girl wanted to remember it? And how could I ask my inlaws without being accusatory and offending them? I freaked out a little bit.

My husband brought it up in a roundabout way with his mother. "The girls don't even remember staying overnight at your house." She laughed, assured him that children's memories are notoriously unreliable, and remembered that they'd had a great time with her.

I still worried a bit, but I had to chalk it up to my kids just preferring the more dramatic story, and feeding off of each other.

I think they were teens when I finally insisted that they stop telling their version of this story. "It looked silly when you were little, but it looks sillier now." Not only could their dad, both of their grandmothers (who didn't agree on much), their grandfather, and both of my my sisters and their families confirm my version of events, and I had ticket stubs with times on them, the mere math was impossible. The time we spent in the air was close to three hours. The layover was an hour and a half. Add that to the hour, each way, that we had to be at the airports before the flights, and we were already at 6 1/2 hours, and their school day was 6 hours long. The flights alone were impossible to do in the length of a school day, to say nothing of drive time, wedding time and dinner time.

The kids were both incredibly puzzled by this fact, when I laid out the timeline, again. (When they were younger, they were sure that I was just misrepresenting how long things took.) "I was sure that (me being gone during school hours only) was how it happened." "I don't remember it that way." And each sister's absolute certainty had been bolstered by their sibling's absolute certainty.

"I know you don't. But that's how it happened." Sometimes, I think that they never did really realize that they'd gotten it wrong; they just stopped complaining about it around their parents.

I think of moments like this sometimes when I'm online reading. I was recently reading an online discussion/argument among friends of mine and flat Earth proponents. One of the flat Earth arguments was, "Why do astronauts' accounts of what it's like to be in space differ from each other? Why do they describe the sky using different adjectives?" Are they kidding?

Think about any event - that Thanksgiving when Uncle Joe passed out in the potatoes, the birth of your children, or even last year's garden or last night's dinner. Do the people who were there describe it the same way? Do they always even remember it? How many times does the average person say, "That's not how it happened"?

In actuality, everyone having identical stories is usually a sign that they've all rehearsed what to say.

Really, considering differing opinions or accounts to be the sign of a huge conspiracy is just outrageous.

"But people who say (X) are so sincere and convinced! And they should know!" people say to me. I'm sure they are. And yet, they could be wrong.

I never confused a live coyote with a cartoon one.