1 Mother 2 Another

The other day Cora and I were walking home
from school together, chatting about this and that. Cora asked how
her kitten had been during the day, and I replied,
“She’s as happy as a clam!”


“Do you know why clams are happy?” Cora asked
seriously.


I looked at her. “No, hon, why are they happy?”


“Because they go around eating the ocean’s trash,
keeping the water clean. And sometimes they like a piece of trash
and keep it for themselves, and hold onto it in their tummy and
turn it into a pearl. And then someone takes the pearl and drills a
hole into it for a necklace, and since the pearl’s had a hole
drilled into it the clam can never have any more babies.”


And Cora skipped on ahead.


I think that Cora is mixing some recent mythology she’s read
with her eco-friendliness, touched more than a bit by her
kitten’s recent neutering surgery.


And I decided – I’m going to let this one go. I just
don’t have the energy to fix it. Sure, I’ll pay for it
in a few years when we have The Talk and she realizes birth control
has nothing to do with making a shiny necklace, but for now, I just
don’t have the energy.


So if your kid comes home with some skewed version of the birds and
the bees from my school, sorry ‘bout that. That one's on
me.