"Are you the baby monster?"
"Nooo."
"You're the bad guy."
"NOOOOOO, I'm NOT the bad guy."
"Are there monsters and ghosts in the real world?"
Genevieve asked this question one recent morning when my mouth was pasted shut with oatmeal. My wife had not yet begun eating, so she jumped right in.
"Well, that's a complicated question. Sometimes there are things that happen, or things that we see, that are difficult to explain, and ghosts and monsters seem like a reasonable explanation."
I immediately thought, yeah, add in aardvarks or fairies!
"But there's always some other reason why these things happen," my wife continued.
Uh-oh. I don't like where this is going.
"The short answer about whether ghosts and monsters live in the real world is, not so much."
No no no no no no no! This is an area of equivocation and vagueness! Don't give away the store when we haven't even hit age five yet! Monsters and ghosts can be useful. And it's only a short step to disbelieving fairies and aardvarks, and then where would be be?
Since then, I told my wife my thoughts about what I saw as her strategic blunder. She was not impressed.
"They won't be confused. Monsters and ghosts aren't real. Aardvarks and fairies leave evidence of their existence, so they're of course real."
I didn't buy it. So later in the day, my wife equivocated when the children asked about monsters and ghosts.
Ever since then, they see either monsters or ghosts in every other room, and have used them as excuses to delay doing things or demand attention. There are ghosts in the bathroom, monsters in the basement. And don't even ask about the closet.
I am beginning to reconsider my position.
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