🔭 The child essay

Poor Snoop.

Nobody wants to explain things to children. Ever. They’re the worst. They don’t know anything and they ask too many questions.

Now, per Mr. Dogg’s situation, I haven’t seen the movie in question, nor have I listened to his comments in context. (SPOILER ALERT: That’s because I have zero interest in celebrity hot takes on culture, morality, or basic human rights.)

But the kid thing, I get that.

Just the other day, I was trying to make pancakes for my then-almost-eleven-year-old daughter and found myself wading into similar shark-infested waters.

“Why does it look like that?” asked my daughter as I whisked eggs into flour.

Put yourself in my place. I’d just parachuted into the country, was battling jet lag and a cold that turned out to be Covid. The last thing I wanted to do was explain how the glutenin and gliadin in the flour absorb water from the eggs and the proteins form gluten bonds, thus creating an elastic network.

I wasn’t ready for The Talk.

“They just mix up like that,” I said.

“But why?” asked my daughter.

“Because of cooking,” I asserted, hands too sticky to Google it myself, too paranoid to ask Alexa for fear of being bombarded with ads for recipe books and remedial chemistry courses.

Kids are used to arguments from authority. School beats that into them.

Later, we went to the movies.

“What’s with the popcorn?” asked my daughter, slurping a soda.

“Well, it’s popped corn kernels,” I said, glad I’d been spared straw physics, hydrostatic pressure, and how added REAL cane sugar is still REAL sugar.

“But some people call it maize,” she said.

“That’s true,” I admitted. A rookie mistake—never let them get a head of steam going. Confident children do not relaxing movie outings make.

“And corn mazes,” she continued. “They’re really maize mazes!”

My heart tore into a million pieces. She’d punned—she’d punned! But I wasn’t sure she knew the difference between homophones and homographs. Even if she did, it was a near impossibility she could parse the difference between mazes and labyrinths. She didn’t have a clew! The shards of my fragile, reglued psyche slid through the spectral hands of whatever brain worm ghost steers the man o' war of dissociated ideas and perceptions I sometimes have occasion to call “self.”

“Yes,” I said, and immediately began sobbing into my popmaize.

Only that didn’t really happen. (Well, the pun did, and, honey, daddy’s proud of you. (Also, the me crying part.))

My daughter, mother, and three-year-old niece stayed home and watched “Frozen.”

Doggone Doggystyle Disney.

“How did she get her cold powers?”

I don’t remember who asked the question—in truth, I may have imagined it due to S-adenosyl-L-methionine overdose—but the question rippled through my blood-brain barrier.

I leapt onto the couch, ready to lay it all out. How, when a woman makes a pact with an Elder God, she gains physical dominion over the elements. But the price she pays is her immortal soul, which will suffer for all eternity, which is, like, a lot longer than a lifetime. And the One True Way lies — Lays? No, lies. — in the many braided paths of chaos to the benevolent but also kind-of-a-dick Goddess, Eris.

Then I took a deep breath like the discontinued ChatGPT model therapist told me.

“Magic,” I said.

Thank Goddess she didn't ask about ICE.