Farewell Munchie
by John Boyd

Face it folks, you have got to be on the ball. You have got to be in shape, in position, raring to go. Because your kids are smarter than you think, and they need answers now.

I won’t go into the endless upward spiral of the “Why?” question every parent gets into with their kid. You tell them the answer, they ask why, you tell them the answer, they ask why, etc. But just as a side note, I figured out that conversation can quickly go from simple curiosity to existential nitpicking in a hurry.

Not too long back I found myself saying, “Because that’s the way it is. If right isn’t wrong, it can only be right, but only if the right has been proven to be right, otherwise being wrong is just an elongation of being right in a truth continuum where moral ambiguity would preside over all truth.” My four-year-old, glassy-eyed and thoughtful looked at me with concern. Only 10 “whys” ago she had asked why the ball was red. Of course you can guess what her response was to my rambling on the precise existence of truth in the universe: “Why?”

Our kids need solid answers. They deserve nothing less, so even if I wind up spinning yarn to a 4-year-old, I feel it’s my duty to shoot her straight. I’ve also found a very handy answer is, “Just because.” I reckon that response ranks right up there with, “’Cause I said so,” and “Mmmrrrmmm.”

We have to be ready at all times. These members of the too-short-to-ride-a-rollercoaster gang want answers and they want them now. It’s our job to be there to nurse their inquisitiveness and nurture their budding intellects. Instilling the thirst for knowledge and tasting the satisfaction of answered questions are building blocks to our kids. They use them as they chase truth throughout their life.

But, I digress. You see, despite all that clap-trap about this that and the other thing I just spouted, sometimes the most effective thing to say is, “I don’t know.”

Last week, my daughter made quite a find. She captured one fat and furry caterpillar. She promptly alerted everyone, and her mom quickly prepared a jar, air holes and all, for the caterpillar’s new home. My daughter knows enough about caterpillars to know that they eat a lot, and then they turn into butterflies. To be honest, that’s twice what I know about them. But she promptly named him Munchie. And we would wait and watch Munchie spin his chrysalis and hatch into a butterfly. (My four-year-old informed me when I called it a cocoon, “Daddy, you’re silly. It’s a chrysalis. Only moths come from cocoons, and they don’t come from caterpillars.” Eh hem, right, I knew that, thanks darling.)

When I went home from work that day, my eldest ran in to show me the jar and caterpillar. Joy radiated from every pore of her body. My face betrayed what only I could see. Munchie was no longer among the living. For the first time in my parenting life, I was faced with the job no father looks forward to performing. The task of telling a gleaming, brown-eyed girl her Munchie was dead.

We dug a small grave for Munchie underneath the azaleas. Her idea seemed right; she wanted to bury him underneath the bush she found him on. She wailed and whimpered, got little comfort from our little funeral.

Then, the why questions began: Why did he die? Why didn’t we know he would die? Why did he stop breathing? Why didn’t we help him?

The questions went on. I tried in vain to satisfy her. Finally, exhausted by her own questions, she looked at me and asked the second-to-last question of the night. “Dad, do you really know why?” I picked her up again, held her little travel-sized self as snuggly as I could and said, “To be honest, I don’t know.” She put her hand on my face and said, “I don’t either.” The crying was over, and soon she was lying in bed, waiting for me to kiss her goodnight.

As I turned out the light, she called to me, her last question encapsulating the joyous optimism of childhood. “Why don’t I find another caterpillar tomorrow and take care of him better?” “You do that sweetie, that’s a great idea,” I said. As the door shut, the last thing I heard her say was, “I’ll name him Munchie the Second.”

John Boyd is the lucky husband of Jennifer Reese Boyd, and the father of three future heartbreakers, Judith (4), Sarah (2) and Janie (3).