It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It by Robert Fulghum

Author:Robert Fulghum [Fulghum, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75501-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1988-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

What do I know now?

For one thing, the last item in the list is false. I did grow up to be old enough to know I, too, will die. I became one of those parents. My own children have themselves passed through kindergarten and their own back-alley education. Though my older son is a man now, only twenty-three years separate us, and we are both able to talk about our childhoods without total embarrassment. He KNOWS now—about the snake. He tells me all the rotten things he did behind my back when he was a kid, and I tell him all the things I knew he was doing but that I ignored because I didn’t want to deal with the problem, considering what I had done at the same age.

Being a parent forces you into a benevolent hypocrisy. It goes with the job. It is comforting for the two of us to confess to each other—it clears the air between us and makes us people to each other.

Here’s the tough part of what I know now: that the lessons of kindergarten are hard to practice if they don’t apply to you. It’s hard to share everything and play fair if you don’t have anything to share and life is itself unjust. I think of the children of this earth who see the world through barbed wire, who live in a filthy rubbled mess not of their own making and that they can never clean up. They do not wash their hands before they eat. There is no water. Or soap. And some do not have hands to wash. They do not know about warm cookies and cold milk, only stale scraps and hunger. They have no blankie to wrap themselves in, and do not take naps because it is too dangerous to close their eyes.

Theirs is not the kindergarten of finger paint and nursery rhymes, but an X-rated school of harsh dailiness. Their teachers are not sweet women who care, but the indifferent instructors called Pain, Fear, and Misery. Like all children everywhere, they tell stories of monsters. Theirs are for real—what they have seen with their own eyes. In broad daylight. We do not want to know what they have learned.

But we know.

And it ain’t kindergarten stuff.

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