“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? You’re the mom.”
Uh oh. Now I’m sweating. Make something up. Make something up quickly, I think to myself. I’m not exactly fast on my feet under pressure, especially the pressure from a 5-year-old who thinks I know everything. And who am I to discourage that thinking? I need an answer, fast.
“It’s mold,” I say.
“On a tree?”
“Sure, why not.”
“No it’s not.”
“You said I know everything, and I say it’s mold.”
"Yeah, Right.” My son smirks and walks away to hang from a branch on a nearby tree.
Yikes, I think to myself. I better get busy and study up on something. Anything. What if my kid asks me another question and I can’t come up with an answer. Sure, he didn’t believe my answer this time, but I came up with something and feigned confidence. When I figure out what that green stuff on the tree is, I’ll just toss it into a conversation some where and correct myself without admitting error. Right?
Well, it turns out there is such a thing a tree mold. Thank you Google. Maybe I do know everything, except of course the names of the all the Transformers, but come on, I’m looking at names like Mudflap, Soundwave, Grimlock and Waspinator. Any mom would struggle with those.
So I’ll jump around on Google tonight, just in case. I’ll just pop in any old phrase and search. Hmmm, the mating rituals of the preying mantis. That has come up recently. We found one on the screen door and we had to move it before the dog saw it and decided to bat it around the yard for a while or have it as a treat. As I carried it gently across the lawn, my son asked where his mom and dad were. I said I was sure they were just over there, in the direction we were headed.
“Does he have a honey?” My son asked.
“A honey?”
“Like daddy is to you.”
“Oh, a honey. Right. Well, maybe she’s over here too,” I say as I place the preying mantis on a nearby bush. I didn’t want to mention that I may be saving a she, not a he, and she has probably bitten the head off her honey already, so he won’t be joining her for dinner. But according to the website Wonderworld.com that turned up on my Google search, which I promptly did right after my son went to bed because he was sure to revisit the saga of the lonely preying mantis again this week, it’s not very common for the female preying mantis to bite the head off the male in the wild. It occurs much more frequently when the mantis’ are in captivity. Whew, I don’t have to explain that, for now. I can just tell my son that the preying mantis is a solitary creature, he hangs alone. To which my son will inevitably comment on how boring it is to hang out alone and then he’ll ask, ‘why don’t I have a brother or a sister to hang out with?’ At this point, I will bring the conversation back to tree mold. I will tell my son that I looked it up on the computer and that tree mold does exist and that’s what we saw on the tree the other day, and I was right, and did he want to go looking for more tree mold? He’ll say cool, because he is 5, and I can coast on that for a while, until the next sweat inducing question comes along. I give it 10 minutes, wish me luck.
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