Posted By Daisy on January 28, 2011

I goofed.

Actually, I could point the finger here at my husband, who was following my lead after the “Poker Face” introduction, but it could so easily have been me that made the same slip.  We failed to pre-screen “Paparazzi,” and now that cat is out of the bag.  It’s a brilliant video, really, but hits on themes I wasn’t nearly ready to start addressing with my not-quite-four-year-old.  I had some choices. I could have said, we aren’t going to watch this anymore because it’s violent.  I didn’t go that direction.  I think I had an instinct that he’d then find the whole thing a tempting, illicit mystery, missing the point as to why the violence bothered me.

So instead, I watch it with him (yes, present tense — I’m in it to win it, so I need to hang in there until he’s done processing it all and finds something else to obsess about).  I answer his questions, giving my best idea of an age-appropriate answer that I can muster.  He knows I find many of the images upsetting and scary.  He doesn’t.  When I say “Those pictures are scary,” he replies, “No they aren’t.”  I am left with the more honest “Well, to ME they are scary.”  His response?  He tells me that is okay and that I just “need to be brave.” He’s right.  For him, I need to be brave and face his questions.

Here are some of the things he’s trying to piece together.  Some of the women depicted in the video are injured, and some clearly are dead.  The boyfriend, poisoned by GaGa at the end, is dead, although he does not look dead.  So, what causes injury versus death?  This unanswerable question comes out in odd ways.  We read “Clifford’s Family” at bedtime, and we joke about how Clifford needs to be careful when he jumps over the barn to be sure he doesn’t land on Emily Elizabeth.  Only now, I’m put to a new test: “Because she could die, right?”  Gosh, maybe….I don’t know how much Clifford weighs and can’t do the math on the force of his accelerated mass.  More than likely she’d just be injured.  But broken bones are not a good thing, so it is still important to be careful and not land n her.   Back to the GaGa video.  She’s injured in one scene, and dancing like her groovy old self in another.  Well, that’s simply an interrupted narrative, but a four year old brain can’t quite figure that.  We do get the gist that she was pushed, she fell, she was seriously injured, and she ultimately, luckily, recovered.

Now, the Bear affirms that the man in the video “is bad.”  Yes, he is a man who does very bad, awful things, particularly to women, but when he’s ultimately poisoned, GaGa still must go to jail, because it is NEVER okay to kill someone.  Now we have to blur the line on that “never.”  When he’s pushing her over a ledge and she grabs a bottle and hits him, that’s actually not necessarily a bad thing, because she’s desperately trying to avoid getting hurt herself.  That line is one he’ll probably have to work on for the rest of his life, just as we all do.

Now we need to know why this man is hurting these women.  It is because he wants to be near famous people and is jealous of people who are famous all at the same time.  Why do people have al these feelings about being famous?  I really don’t know.  The Bear has figured out he won’t have to face those complicated feelings because he “is already famous.”  Hs working definition of famous is obviously still a little rough, but at least his ego is in good shape.  Fair enough.

So, I am busy these days trying to dance through this puzzling territory with him without overloading him.  I’m sure I’m getting some of it wrong, but hope I’m getting a lot of it right.  I’m muddling through, adjusting the level of my answers based on the level of his questions.  It’s a mess — but that’s parenting.

Daisy

P.S.  I’m relieved to get back to Poker Face, where his follow-up question during GaGa’s white unitard scene is, “Why is her husband not wearing a shirt?”  This, I can handle.  “I don’t know babe, but I bet he’s cold, what do you think?”

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