back then

I’m finding that is particularly difficult to get a small child to understand that everything that happened “back then” didn’t all happen at the same time. That when Jesus was multiplying fish and loaves, and Tahirih was showing up without her veil, and Lara Ingles was crying over a broken doll were all different times. She seems to think that Gramma Jamma was going to college while Baha’u'llah was in exile and that “back then, when I was 2…” might have been the same time that there was this big horse that the Trojans were hiding inside of.

How do you fix that magnitude of an errant timeline? I suppose starting our day with spiritual history and then moving to our more textbookish study of ancient civilizations probably doesn’t help, but what to do? Discontinuing our mapping of the Baha’i Faith doesn’t seem like a step in the right direction, but neither does ending Aegean civilizations studies and I sure can’t seem to permenantly straighten things out in her cute little head. I’ll explain the huge time differences and say, “do you understand?” She’ll smile and nod and then 2 days later she’ll make a comment that makes it clear that we’re back at square 1. It’s like explaining eternity to a dog. No good, right?

For now I guess I’ll keep on doing what I’m doing and hope that her sweet little brain makes that important leap on it’s own while I google the fire out of the issue looking for an answer. I never encountered this topic in my teacher ed classes in college. Perhaps it’s because the American education system rarely ventures far beyond the time between the Mayflower and the Civil War while religious studies have been effectively pushed out. When you focus on the same, relatively small time period year after year the question of Abraham talking the Mongols out of invading China yet again probably never comes up.

Well, blessed are we to have such a wacky thoughtful troop of tots. I suppose the parents who don’t have these problems also don’t get the joy of hearing their children come up with amazing ideas about healing the world’s problems with time-traveling sages and religious figures. There are worse problems to have.