Tough Questions

This morning, while driving my kids to daycare, Liam asked me a question.

"Mommy? Who builded the world?"










I paused, and immediately proceeded to panic. Recently, my tenacious 3-year-old has been asking me a lot of questions that I haven't prepared answers for yet. Prime example. A week or so ago he asked me, referring to his little brother, why we chose that baby. I explained that we didn't choose him, we made him. And, as you can imagine this led to more questions, ones I wasn't prepared to answer.

Many parents have their standard go-to answers for big questions such as these. I don't. I didn't realize I need to be prepared to answer them so soon.

But, back to the question at hand. Who builded the world? And my panic.

We're not religious. I don't associate with any one religion, but I DO believe in God. To put it simply, I don't believe any one person on this planet can claim to know the answers to all those questions most religions try to answer. So, I don't associate with any of them.

But, I do believe in God, so I could say that God builded the world and that wouldn't be disingenuous to the beliefs of our family.

On the other hand, I don't want to confuse my three-year-old too much. We don't go to church, and we haven't really brought up the religion questions yet. It'll come, just not yet. I don't want to open up a whole can of worms I'm not prepared to deal with. Especially on a morning when I'm completely sleep deprived (a whole other story), and I have a mere five minutes before arriving at our destination.

On the other hand (I have a lot of hands), what better answer could I possibly come up with? Well honey, you see there was this big bang at some point eons ago and it created the entire universe, along with earth. We're really just a star among many stars constantly spreading further and further away from the point of origin. I'm no astrophysicist, but I think that's the basic theory.

UGH, I can't even tell him, with certainty, the scientific answer to the question.

The pause I was taking to answer his question was growing too long, so finally I said with the most sincere and genuine voice I could muster, "I really don't know, Liam."

And he replies, "Did road workers builded the road?"

"OH! Who builded the road?! Yes, Liam, road workers built the road."

Sometimes, this parenting thing is not as hard as we make it out to be.