In May, while I was engaged in various bridesmaids’ activities
in the city of Chicago, weekend off Don was
alone and lose in the Windy
City with a ten mile run
rush of endorphins and his wallet. A
dangerous combination, made even more so by our location in the Watertower Place on Michigan Avenue. When I returned to the hotel room to change
for the rehearsal dinner, I found Don napping and several gigantic American
Girl Doll bags crowding the hotel room entryway.
Little did I know that this frenzy of commerce, followed by
my horrified and confused exclamation of “What have you done!?” would lead to
some of the most interesting and unexpected conversation that I could ever hope
to have with my three year old daughter.
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| Lucy's Kit Kittredge haircut |
Since Kit Kittredge came into our lives that fateful
Memorial Day we have decided to focus less on the dolls and their many
accessories and outfits, and more on the girl’s stories and their accompanying
book series. So far we have read all of
Kits, Kaya’s and Felicities books, and Lucy has decided we will work our way
through the rest of the girls chronologically.
It is adorable how she has every girl’s description memorized, and
sometimes fashions names for her imaginary friends or playmates from one of the
girl’s biographies. The other day in the
car she was having an elaborate imaginary play session with someone named
“Spunky Colonia” and after a few minutes it was Don who figured out that she
was remembering that phrase from Felicities’ description as a “spunky,
sprightly colonial girl.”
So far we have had long talks about homelessness, poverty,
the Great Depression, kidnapping, tribal rivalries, tyranny, patriotism, and
hoboes. These are all subjects I never
expected to discuss with a three year old, but they came along naturally enough
in the framework of the stories we have read so far.
Last night, however, I encountered a new subject while
reading the last book in the Felicity series that really took my by surprise:
cannibalism. If you are not familiar
with the American Girl’s let me sum something up for you, an observation that
was put very succinctly by Don after we had already read a few stories. American Girl dolls serve a very important
function for privileged families. They
provide these families with a framework to teach their privileged daughters about
adversity, usually the kind of adversity that these girls will largely be
sheltered from their entire lives.
Poverty, depression, hunger, homelessness, imprisonment, death, war,
etc. Each girl lives in a time of change
and turmoil, and has to display great strength of character to overcome her
situation or problems that arise.
Our current heroine, Felicity, is living in colonial Virginia in 1775, and
facing the many changes that our country faced at the dawn of the American
Revolution. Her beloved Grandfather is a
loyalist to King George while the rest of the family are Patriots. At the end of the books, her Grandfather goes
out in bad weather to help several people at the jail, becomes ill, and
eventually dies. Now, I expected this to
affect Lucy deeply, as she is very sensitive to death. I expected tears and sadness and a long talk
about the nature of life and death.
What I did not expect was this.
Lucy: did they take his bones back to the plantation to bury
them?
Me: Yes, they did. He
wanted to be buried at his plantation.
Lucy: oh. After they
ate him?
Me: I’m sorry. What?
Lucy: They buried his bones after they ate him.
Me: Just one second sweetie.
Let me think about this.
<<pause to gather my incredibly scattered wits>> Lucy, do you think that we eat people after
they die, like we are eating Chubbs?
Lucy: Well, yeah.
Me: OK, that is
understandable. Let’s talk about
that. Eating other humans is actually
called cannibalism, and amongst humans it is considered to be very, very
bad. It’s called a cultural taboo.
Lucy: Taboooooooo.
Me: Yeah. So we do eat lots of different animals.
Lucy: YEAH! We NUM
them up!
Me: That’s right. We
eat cows, and pigs, and chickens, and many other things…
Lucy: AND horses!
Me: Well, actually,
in America
we don’t really eat horse. That is
considered another kind of taboo because they are companion animals, like dogs
and cats. In other places they eat dogs
and cats and horses, but not in America.
Lucy: oh…
Me: And we don’t eat other humans either. It’s very, very bad. Some animals eat each other. For instance, if a shark gets hurt and other
sharks are around, they might eat the hurt shark. But one of the things that separate us from
other animals is that we do not eat our dead, we bury them.
Lucy: OK.
In hindsight, it makes sense. I mean, I was an anthropology major. I know all about the various cultures that
condoned and practiced cannibalism of some form throughout history. Even now it is not considered a mental
illness, and is practiced in extreme circumstances, during wars or famines,
though it is then almost always considered a crime.
The point being that the cultural taboo against cannibalism
is just that – cultural. It is passed on
through culture, and a culture can either subscribe to it or not. Children learn a culture through all sorts of
avenues: parents, extended family, schools, other children, media, etc. Most of the time I feel like the question of
cannibalism gets addressed without parents even really knowing. I guess I never really thought it was going
to be an actual conversation that I had with my kids, something that I had to
spell out and explain.
But Lucy is the precocious kind, and we have had to have all
sorts of conversations with her that we never expected. The difference between boys and girls
conversation came when she was only 21 months!
This past summer we bought a pig at the Steuben County
4-H Fair, had it butchered and processed and have most of it in our basement
freezer. We like knowing where our meat
came from, and supporting local kids and their families instead of factory
farming corporations when we choose to eat meat. Lucy actually met Chubs at the fair before we
bought him, and she was very excited when we picked up the meat and took it
back to the house.
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| Chubs |
However, the first night we had a pork burger at the house,
it was too big for her to finish, and Don started to explain to her how
important it was that we don’t waste meat.
He told her that Chubs died so that we could eat him, and we had to
respect and honor that by not wasting him.
She looked at him, her eyes filled with tears, her lips trembled and she
exclaimed “He died?! I didn’t want him
to die!! Why did he have to die,
Daddy?!” Well, it seems we had skipped a
key step in our explanation process there.
She knew we were buying Chubs to eat.
She knew we took him to the butcher.
She knew he came back from the butcher as many packages wrapped in white
paper filled with bacon and chips and sausage.
But she didn’t know that to go from pen to butcher to our freezer he had
to die in the process.
The whole Chubs affair (after a heartfelt talk and
explanation she continues to enjoy pork products more than any other meat. If you tell her something came from Chubs,
she will devour it) probably contributed to her confusion over cannibalism as
well. We wanted some meat, we bought
Chubs, and then we ate him. Felicity’s
grandfather died, so he was already dead, so they probably ate him. Right?
We finished the Felicity books last night, and tomorrow we
hope to go to the library to pick up the Josephina series. Josephina lives on a ranchero in New Mexico in 1824. I can’t begin to imagine what conversations
this new character will open up.
