Dazed and Confused

I’m really annoyed about the argument that people don’t want gay marriage or families addressed publicly because “it might confuse the kids”. Oh, come on. You’ll have to do better than that. Shoelaces confuse kids. In fact, growing up could be described as the process by which one goes from confused by, well, pretty much everything to a state of being unconfused. Well, not completely unconfused. But you know. Pretty much having a handle on the basics.

I think my entire childhood was pretty much one long confusion. One more thing to be befuddled about would have been no big deal. Which pretty much describes the way the only child I’ve ever seen actually go through the explanation of “Annie has two daddies”. He went through about 30 seconds of “What? Really? You’re kidding me? That’s funny. Okay. Whatever.” At 5, he had way more trouble figuring out the ketchup bottle (he’d never encountered one that wasn’t squeezable - hilarious). And a whole lot more interest in the outcome.

So, unless you’re going to eliminate all of the “confusing” things in the world like shoelaces and glass ketchup bottles, parents are just going to have to add two adults who love each other very much to the list of things they’ll need to explain. For the most part, kids brains are still mushy enough that they can take in all sorts of new things, no problem. It’s only adults who seem to have a hard time with it. And, if you really run into a kid who just doesn’t get it, you can always fall back on my Mom’s all-purpose phrase for making awkward parent/child conversations go way: “It’s none of your business.”