The Honesty of Children

My kids laugh at me when I jump rope. They say they can’t help it. It’s just so funny to watch my belly jiggle when I jump. They cover their mouths with their hands and promise they won’t laugh if I’ll please please do it again. And then they laugh.

I gave them a good talking to about how we should treat other people, how it’s not nice to laugh at someone because of their physical body and that even though I was pretty secure and not prone to being devastated by their giggles, other people might not be so secure.

I stopped jumping and they stopped laughing. Magoo even came up to me later, looked at my stomach and said, “See? I’m not laughing at it now. I just laughed when you were jumping because it was SO funny. You know?”

Yeah. I know. But I’m old enough to have learned to control what I say and what I laugh at most of the time. Kids are more honest than that.

One of his friends was over this week, watching Wanda playing on the floor. “That’s a weird toy!” she exclaimed, “It’s a slug! With a HUMAN FACE!”

Essentially yes. It is. But a grownup would never say that.

Then there’s Magoo’s other friend who was coming over to play last week. I told his mom that it was good he would be there to keep Magoo occupied because my house was trashed because we’d been moving the furniture around and had let the house go to shambles. She said what most polite women say when a friend apologizes for the unsightly state of her house, “Oh, you should see my house. It’s a mess all the time and I don’t have your excuse.” I’m paraphrasing here but I think we’ve all said that line or had it said to us at one time or another. It’s comforting. It’s a gesture of friendship.

So we got back to our house and as I opened the door, Magoo’s friend got a wide-eyed look on his face. “Wow!” he said, “This really IS a mess.” He then leaned towards me with a conciliatory air and said, “You know, my house isn’t actually messy.”

Called his mom a liar right there in my front entry. It was all I could do to not bust out laughing. Yep. It was a mess. But he played with Magoo while I power-cleaned and everyone was too preoccupied with their fun to notice what parts of me may or may not have been jiggling around hilariously.