The Traditional Family

[porphyry]

 I always suspected that Malkhos and I were born too late.

Every night, I read Madeline four of her favorite books before she goes to bed.  One is called Bludbird's Nest.  The story is fairly simple:  the narrative begins in autumn and chronicles a mother bird working on her project of building a nest for the spring.  As the pages are turned and the story is told about how she builds the nest, brown yarn, strand by strand, takes the shape of a nest.  The last page of the story features a pop-up nest with four baby bluebirds in it.

This is where Madeline gets confused.  "Where is the daddy bird?"  she asks, and I must admit, the first time she asked me this question, she took me by surprise.  "I don't know," I said.  "Maybe off looking for more worms."

But Madeline didn't accept this.  "No, it's that one right there!" she said, pointing to the largest of the baby birds.

"Is it?" I said.

"Yes," she replied. "And that's the Grammy bird, and the Papa bird, and the Andrew bird!"

"That's right," I said.

Later, Malkhos said to me, "May God make sure that the Department of Family Services never knows that we're telling her that a family has both a mother and a father in it." 

"Of course not," I said.  "It might be actionable."

Comments

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Having grown up with lovely swedish Elsa Beskow stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_Beskow (I had to rewrite "The Children of The Forest", though, as I didn´t approve of the ending) accompanied by german horrorstories like: "Struwwelpeter" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter (given us kids by our german grans, who saw no harm in telling tiny kids that their little fingertips will be cut off, if they refuse to have their nails cut by the necessary scissors) makes me feel not only extremely old but also completely incongruous with "modern child culture".
I wonder whom of us took the greater harm, in the end; the ones growing up now or kids like us, who had storybook childhoods climbing trees and the whole bit?

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I must be getting old because I think we had it better. Nostalgia for the past and all that. :-)

Modern child culture is strange, and that's why we feel so out of place sometimes.