the hard questions

The other day my daughter (3.5 yo) asked me what god was. I don't believe in god, but think it's up to each individual to make his or her own decisions about religion and spirituality. So I asked her what she thought god was and she replied, "Daddy says it's the man in the sky." My reaction was hard to conceal, I was irritated that he'd given her that kind of BS answer and insulted that he decided to tell her that god was a man. I explained to may daughter that no one really knows if god is a man or woman or something in between, since no one has ever seen god and that we would continue this discussion when Dad was around to explain his answer a little more completely. He came home and I asked him about it. He said he initially told her that god was an omnipresent being, but, being 3, she didn't understand, so he dumbed it down to "man in the sky." Trying to provide my own perspective, I told my daughter that I thought god is like santa claus or the easter bunny or spider man, they are all characters who have been made up to explain a story. She asked if we had the story of god in the house. I said no, but we could look for one this weekend. Sigh...

My friend relayed a story about her hard question this week from her 4.5 yo daughter who asked what "this" was and pointed to her nipple. My pal said, "nipple." "No" her daughter explained, "the stuff around the nipple." "Oh that's your breast" "What's in it?" "Well, there is muscle and tissue..." "TISSUES???!" "No, not kleenex, but, ah, like the stuff in your arms." "What do they do?" "When you grow up they will grow and you'll wear a bra, like mommy, to support them and be more comfortable (and my friend clued me into her internal narrative of 'lie, lie, lie' regarding the comfortable part) and then when you're a mommy (and I interjected with 'when you're 35') they bring milk to the baby to feed him or her."

I so want my child to be curious and bright and know everything she needs to know to survive and not make the same stupid mistakes I made, but how do I see into the future to know whether she will need something like religion to get her through? When do you tell them the bad things and how do you know you've told them enough? These are the hard questions, I think. And what I really want is the wisdom of my grandmothers to guide me on this, but, alas they're gone, and I wasn't smart enough to really pick their brains while they were alive, as if I'd remember any of it anyway. This is why you need a mother and/or father who is around, to help answer some of these questions. It's why I need to take great care of myself, so I don't abandon my daughter the way my mother abandoned me. So she has someone to talk to about the stuff you don't give a lot of thought to anymore.