Spring Break - Day Four - Unanswerable Questions

Spring Break- Day Four - Answering the Unanswerable

Kids ask a lot of questions. And "a lot" as a quantifier is an understatement. My kids ask me stuff all of the time. From the minute they wake up I am peppered with questions. Usually the first of the day is, "Do we have school this day?" quickly followed by "Why do we have school this day?" These types of questions are simple and therefore simple to answer - "yes" and "because its Tuesday" - you don’t even have to be awake to nail these! But as the day unfolds, the questions usually become more difficult - "Why does my waffle taste like it smells like cinnamon even if the box only says Homestyle because that is gross?" But they are still answerable - "probably because you are making that up to be a pain in the ass" or "in some people’s homes the style is cinnamon - ISN’T THAT CRAZY!"

Sometimes though, the questions get so difficult they are downright unanswerable. And that is a dangerous thing. Because unanswered questions jeopardize your entire credibility as a parent. When your kids come to you for answers it’s because they assume that you are an expert and, knowing this, you can’t pin your whole reputation to false information. So its in your best interest to answer all of their questions to the best of your ability. And if you don’t have that much ability, you’d better get it quick. Because too many "I don’t knows" or "Ask your father’s" will soon have your kids consulting someone else when the really important questions come up. And let’s be honest, you don’t want anybody else (their friends, your neighbors, your husband) explaining things like puberty, or sex, or relationships.

The empty hours of Spring Break at our house have become a breeding ground for these dangerous, unanswerable questions. This afternoon while eating lunch, my two older children posed a series hypothetical situations to which they fully expected legitimate answers. And from the moment the first of these questions was posed, I had a familiar feeling that I was screwed. Here’s how it went down.

Child One: "Mommy, if you shoot off a missile and then it hits a house made of wood - doesn’t it keep going through the wood even though it will explode up the whole house?"
Me: " It will definitely explode up that house - but what do you mean keep going?"
Child One: "KEEP GOING THA-REW!"
Me: "Uhhm."
Child Two: " Well what if the house is made of bricks, so then it will just explode it up and stop right?"
Me: "So are you asking me if missiles can be stopped by bricks but not wood?"
Child One: "What if you shoot off a missile and it hits another missile, which missile will explode first?"
Child Two: "What if you shoot a bullet at a missile, then what about that?"
Child One: "Or what if a missile hits some lava?"
Chile Two: "YEAH!"
Child One: "Mommy how about if you shoot off a rocket and a missile which one is faster?"
Child Two: "What if you hit a missile with a bomb?"

I am seriously unable to answer any of these questions. My knowledge of missiles and rockets is limited to the movie October Sky ( which I have seen approximately 27 times while substitute teaching for high school physics class). I don’t think - "If you get really good at building rockets you won’t have to grow up to be a coal miner" - is the answer my kids are looking for. Usually when I don’t know the answer to something, I do what we all do, I google it and then I wiki it. No luck, the Internet offers no answers to the unique scenario of a bullet hitting a missile. It is pretty easy to locate instructions on how to create both a missile and bullet, but I didn’t really want to spend significant time on those sites (enabling damning cookies just seems too risky in this day and age). Aside from inspirational teen movies, the only other missile knowledge I have is related to the recent government plan to shoot a missile at a rogue satellite thereby blowing up the satellite before it can land somewhere on U.S. soil. This sounds disturbingly similar to the kind of thing my kids were proposing. Which should only serve to scare the pants off of all of us - upper level, national security decisions are being made by a group of people with the problem solving skills of a preschooler and a second grader all hopped up on goldfish and apple juice!

And none of that left me with any real answers for my kids. You see when kids ask questions, they don’t want answers to other similar questions, they want answers to their EXACT questions. So I was stuck doing the thing I hate the most, waiting for my husband to come home and turning over all the questions to him. It turns out that neither of us knows what exactly happens when a missile lands in lava, but we’re pretty sure it’s awfully hot.