The Hard Things

Tonight was a Sunday Night like we haven’t had in a long time. My memories of Sunday nights include the weekly Disney movie, a tray of saltines, apples, and sliced cheese, and a big silver bowl full of home-popped-and-buttered popcorn.

Though not quite the same, tonight we actually managed to fit a movie in before Cambrie went to bed. We let her eat a patchwork dinner in front of the TV (on a beach towel with a food tray and a full-body bib--we aren’t crazy) while she watched the Lion King.

Patrick and I both agree: this was probably the first full-length movie that our little girl has sat through and actually watched. But that milestone (ummm, I guess it’s not exactly the type of milestone you record in the baby book…) didn’t come without its caveats. We didn’t quite realize what a morally complex movie The Lion King was. I mean, gee whiz there’s a lot to deal with there!

It started when I was cleaning up Cambrie’s finished dinner in the kitchen. I heard the insidious Scar chatting with poor little Simba down in the ravine. Uh oh, I thought, maybe I’ll just sit with her for this little bit.

So in I went. As soon as I sat down and pulled Cambrie onto my lap, the questions started.

“Wuh happen?”

“Simba is afraid he’s going to get hurt. There are a lot of gazelle running around him.”

“Wuh happen? A daddy?”

“Yes, it looks like his daddy is going to save him!”

“Mommy, a-fall? A-daddy fall?”

“Yes, his daddy fell. He fell down and was hurt.”

“A-daddy fall down. A-hurt.”

She repeated that phrase a few more times. She understood that. Grandma, after all, fell in the garden and hurt her arm. Cambrie herself had fallen outside and hurt her knee. Unfortunately, then came the tough part.

What really should I do when my daughter is asking questions about things like Disney-movie-death? On one hand, I don’t remember anything moral or life-and-death-type-of-difficult about Disney movies as a child. They never bothered me. I don’t remember them being hard to swallow at all, even when I was very young. I just watched a movie and enjoyed it. So why shouldn’t I just let Cambrie do the same? She is, after all, only TWO YEARS OLD. It’s not like she can appreciate good and evil, responsibility and jealousy, or even… well, or even alive or dead.

But there she was in my lap, asking me question after question about the movie, keeping her own running commentary for me. It was as though she wanted to be sure she understood, and she wanted to be sure I knew she understood. “It’s like this, mommy, right? That is what happened.”

How can I fault her for wanting to know and understand? And I want her to know, too, to have the tools to deal with things that she’s going to face in life. Even if she doesn’t understand the meaning behind the things I tell her, she’ll remember the words. She’ll store them away. She’ll eventually make connections. And, perhaps most importantly, she’ll know that she can talk to Mommy and Daddy about it. I can’t imagine many things I want more in our parent-child relationship than clear and open communication lines, even at the age of two.

So I pushed forward. “Do you see Simba? He is sad. He is sad that his daddy was hurt.”

“Daddy a-fell. A-hurt his-self.”

“Yes.” Big breath. “His daddy was hurt very badly. …His daddy died. Simba is very sad.”

“A-Daddy hurt?”

“Yes, he died.” Ohmigoodness what have I gotten myself into. And I had thought it was hard trying to explain the dead lizard we had found outside one day. “That means he is gone. He can’t see or eat or breathe anymore. It means Simba is all alone now. He is very sad.”

Crikey. Why is this movie rated G??

“…He is sad? A-daddy fall. A-hurt his-self.”

One more try. “It means his daddy left to go live with Heavenly Father.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

…Really? That worked? Well, it did until Simba grew up with a mane like his father’s. Cambrie immediately cried, “Daddy back!”

I guess brand new two-year-olds don’t quite grasp the concept of “I was tiny, now I’m small, later I’ll be bigger, and maybe I’ll look like mommy or daddy.”

Here’s a list of the other way-too-old-for-her subjects Cambrie and Patrick and I covered during this movie.

• When you don’t listen to your daddy, sometimes you can get in situations that might hurt you. 
• DEATH (like that’s not a whopper) 
• Bad lions make other people sad. 
• When people are angry, sometimes they fight. They hurt each other. 

Again, we’re not fooling ourselves that Cambrie understood any of what we were telling her. We weren’t after all, doing any explaining. We were mostly just giving labels for the feelings and actions we saw. 

But when Cambrie is a little older and starts to pay more attention to the world around her, she’s going to notice times where she disobeys and finds herself in a scary situation. She’s going to see death, and she’s going to see people whose actions make others very sad. She’s going to see anger, battles, wars of weapons and of words. I want her to be aware and to try to understand. I want her to ask questions. And I want our family to be the safe place where she can work through the hard things.

In the end, I still feel overwhelmed by this movie that I used to enjoy just because I could sing along to the songs. Is this what being an adult does to you? No—it’s probably just being a parent. Strange what being responsible for a little sponge of a mind can change your world so much.