Maine news, sports, weather from Waterville Morning Sentinel

March 9

PARTY OF TWO: Follow the turkeys if you want to

Wendy Fontaine

It’s amazing how much my daughter is like me.
She is bossy, opinionated, always has to have the last word. And when she sets her mind to something, there is no stopping her.
But the way she is most like me lies in the endless stream of questions forever flowing from her fresh little mind.
“Mama,” she will say. “Do dinosaurs have ankles?”
Then she will wait for an answer, as though she simply asked what day of the week it is.
“What kind of juice do elephants like to drink?”
“Do jellyfish eat peanuts?”
“How do freckles stay on you?”
I suppose the interrogations are payback for my ten years of being a newspaper reporter. After all, I made a career out of pestering people with questions they would rather have avoided and wondering in print about things so peculiar that few would even know where to begin investigating.
That’s exactly how my three-year-old is with her daily queries, which range from merely odd to completely bizarre.
“Mama, do owls give hugs?” she says.
And because it’s fun, I usually have an equally silly answer at the ready.
“Yes, they do,” I say, matching her seriousness. “But only if there’s a full moon.”
This week, I decided to turn the tables on her.
We were riding in the car on our way to daycare one morning when I tossed out my own crazy question.
“Hey, Angie,” I said. “Do turkeys go to the movies?”
I could see her quizzical stare in my rearview mirror. She paused. Then she shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I never followed one. Maybe we should follow one someday and find out.”
Just like her mama — always willing to go find the answer.
That’s what we Fontaine girls do. We follow the questions.
But what do you do when the answers are a bit more elusive? When the questions are much more complex?
Last week Angie and I were six pieces into her Dora the Explorer puzzle when she stopped, looked up at me and dropped a doozy.
“Mama,” she said. “Do mommies ever get hurt?”
Another time, we were pushing a stroller full of teddy bears through the neighborhood when she said, “Mama, why don’t we live with daddy anymore?”
Children have a way of cutting right through the bull, straight to the things that matter most. And sometimes, as parents, we have to walk the fine line between honesty and reassurance.
Yes, sometimes mommies get hurt, I told her. But your mommy is perfectly fine.
And I don’t know why we don’t live with daddy anymore, but I do know mommy and daddy both love you very much.
Those are normal questions from an inquisitive child, but what I think Angie was really asking on those days was “Am I safe?”
Did I answer her correctly? I have no idea. But I did my best.
Honestly, I am wondering the same things she is. I wonder if mommies get hurt and why we don’t live with her daddy anymore.
I wonder whether I can pay my bills this month. If the car will break down. If one of us is going to get sick. I wonder if I’m making the right decisions and what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.
I’m a grownup and grownups are supposed to have all the answers. But for the first time ever, this former newspaper reporter is learning that sometimes in life there are no answers, no matter how badly you want them to be there.
In this age of Google searches and instantaneous information, sometimes you just have to sit on top of your pile of question marks and be patient.
There’s a time to go find the anwer, and a time to sit tight and let the answer find you.
Or, as Angie might say, you can follow the turkeys if you want to, but they may not lead you to the movies.

Wendy Fontaine’s “Party of Two” column appears the first and third Sunday of the month. Her e-mail address is: party2fontaine@gmail.com