Sometimes I think that the greatest benefit of having children is having the opportunity to see the world through completely different eyes. Of course, sometimes this benefit is not so easy to recognize. For instance, it’s hard for me to see the advantage of seeing the world as one massive urinal, but, apparently, that is how it appears to some children—the male ones, especially. (“It was just quicker to go outside,” they always say, an argument I might actually be tempted to believe if it wasn’t for the fact that there have been times when they stood inside the house so that they could pee out the window. And don’t give me that, “Oh,you know you would do it, too, if you could,” because no, I wouldn’t.)
I also don’t understand the teenage appeal of seeing the world as one great big place to lose your car keys, homework, permission slips, cell phones, and shoes in over and over again. While I, too, tend to see the world as a delightfully chaotic place, I also enjoy having my own small corner of it somewhat tamed into order. But again, that’s just me.
But still, for all the times I am completely confounded by the way these people who live in my house see the world, there are times when their take on things is so refreshingly different that I realize that I am the one who has been deluded all along. Take, for example, my son Clyde’s reaction to hearing the old “Superman” radio show intro for the first time.
“It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!”
The first time he heard that he cocked his head, thought about it for a minute, and then asked, “Why were they so excited when they thought it was a bird?”
That’s very good question, and one that I had simply never considered before. (For that matter, why were they so excited when they thought it was a plane?) And the thing is, it wasn’t just because Clyde still sees things through “young” eyes that he caught on to the incongruity: I must have listened to that intro a thousand times in my own youth, and never once did that thought occur to me.
Then there was “Les Miserables.” After watching it with us on Christmas Day, Clyde was thoughtful. “Did you like it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. I thought that when they died at the end they were going to get to go to heaven.”
“They did,” I said, remembering what seemed like the entire cast climbing up the monumental barricade at the end. Clyde, however, was not convinced. “That wasn’t heaven,” he said with disbelief. “That was France.”
At this point I feel I must interject that Clyde was not disparaging France. He’s been to France. He likes France. But, apparently, when it comes to Eternal Paradise, he sets the bar a little bit higher. As well he should.
Maybe that’s the biggest advantage to living with people who see the world through fresh eyes: they tend to have much higher (albeit often much more unrealistic) expectations about everything. Which is a good thing: it’s nice sometimes to be forced to climb up out of our own morass of adult cynicism and low expectations and see the world that way, too. A world where things are fair (or at least try to be), a world where people save their excitement for things that are actually exciting, and a world where, when you die, your Eternal Reward is more than just more of the same.
And of course, let’s not forget a world where you can pee anywhere you like, anytime. Even out a window.