I hope you all had a lovely weekend. I certainly did. The hubs and I brought the kids to the Museum of Natural History. As a family of nerds we had plenty to look at. The hubs took our sons to see the dinosaurs first. I took my daughter to the underwater exhibits. My kids are a curious crew of critters. No car ride, or trip to anywhere  is complete without a barrage of questions for their father and me.

Underwater life is definitely not something I know much about. In fact, deep sea creatures kind of give me the creeps. My daughter of course proceeded to ask me questions about this and that, like “how jellyfish breathe?” and “can electric eels power lightbulbs?” I did my best to answer the questions I didn’t know by reading the information provided by the museum. But for many of her questions, I simply had to say “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know a lot of things, Mom” was her response.

Hearing that from a five year old hurt. It really stung. Obviously she is too young to understand that every grown-up can’t possibly know everything about everything, especially aquatic life. Who does she think I am? A marine biologist? Still, the desire to appear all knowing to one’s children is a strong one. My mother always tried to keep up that appearance. Whenever my siblings or I would ask her a difficult question that she didn’t know, especially the science-related ones, She would simple make up and answer. This was fine kept us under control till we became teenagers and realized that Mom was wrong about a lot. I believe this is the cause of the contention between parents and teenagers.

I’m no parenting expert, and my oldest is only nine, but I believe the problems with teenagers comes from the fact that most kids think their parents are omniscient and perfect on every level. Once a kid reaches middle school-age, he or she realizes that parents aren’t perfect and maybe they are wrong on a lot. I know in my case, when I realized all the little white lies I was told growing up, I started to mistrust everything Mom said.

Before we left the museum, I came up with an obvious solution. I told my daughter,

“You know all those questions I wasn’t able to answer? We’re going to look the answers when we get home.”

(Don’t worry, I’m didn’t show her how to Google–not that she won’t figure it out on her own soon.) Problem solved. More important than her thinking I have the answers, is to show her how to get the answers. Although my little girl no longer thinks I’m a super-genius, at least she knows I’m sincere. Hopefully my theory will prove right when she turns thirteen.