Differences

Last night during story time Emma blurted out to Rob, "Daddy one day you are going to die". Rob, being the pragmatic thinker that he is, sat there and looked at her and said, "you are right Emma, but hopefully not until I am really old". Then Emma decided to turn this into a game, "then Mommy will die" ... and so on and so on. Rob says she really listed about everyone she's ever known and he was quite uncomfortable with her presentation and that she sort of became silly about it. Of course, being a social worker I said "babe, it's a good thing she's trying to figure it all out and it's even better that she's comfortable talking to you about it". He then says, "yea but I was not comfortable and I told her we don't talk about dying".

EEERRRRRR record player stopping .... to me that was like nails on a chalk board ... "we don't talk about _____" that is something that is sacrilege to me! To me, we talk about EVERYTHING.

I explained to my sweet hubby that although he may be uncomfortable sharing his feelings, it's really important to allow our children to talk about their ideas and feelings and of course guide them into more proper outlets. He says he understands that, but this came out of left field (guy analogy) and he wasn't ready for this type of conversation. So again, he has hopes that these sort of "heavy discussions" will come up planned. But we did more processing and I let him know that most definitely these things will always be coming "out of left field". He says from his statement "we don't talk about dying" Emma just laughed and said "Well Leo's Papa died. He was really old and sometimes old people die very fast. Leo won't see his papa anymore". So there you go, the little 3 year old social worker in progress! She helped Daddy along and they had a very nice conversation, "far too adult" according to Rob but for me it shows that though Rob and I have differences in our comfort levels (especially around communicating) our children are going to get the best of both worlds and are really comfortable sharing their feelings.