Parents struggle to explain the facts of life to their children without causing emotional distress. While the most common understanding of life is an individual’s time from birth to death, it is also about how life continues through offspring. Children are fascinated by the miracle of procreation and seek messy answers to their questions. The mystery of why things happen is another fact of life that can be hard to accept, but it’s important to remember that life goes on.
Most parents look forward to the day when their child will ask about the facts of life. They don’t know exactly how to explain them without causing irreparable damage. After all, telling a tender child that everyone has to pay taxes and that death is inevitable is likely to scare him for life! While these may be facts of life, the idiom originally meant the facts of procreation.
The word life has many meanings. Most people immediately think of the extent of an individual’s time from birth to death. The most philosophical understanding of life is broader and deeper than that. While individuals die, life continues through their offspring. Life is not just a thing; it is also a how.
For children especially, the miracle of how human beings got here is astounding. When they tug at mom’s skirt or dad’s shirt and look at them with utter innocence, most parents fear what will come out of their mouth: “Where do babies come from?” The facts of life they are looking for are about this how.
Most parents explain and explain and explain with cold hard facts. The mother’s ovary releases an egg, which is fertilized by the father’s sperm. The fertilized egg attaches itself to the side of the mother’s uterus and grows into an embryo. After nine months, labor begins and the baby is born.
Nice, clear information devoid of any emotional distress might work for the parent, but the facts of life children seek out are messier. They want the why as well as the how and the what. Unfortunately, the answer to why things happen is what everyone wishes they could figure out, but no one really can.
The mystery of why things happen the way they do, whether it’s conceiving or losing a job, falling in love or being dumped, is really just another fact of life. Maybe it’s just the bumper cars that actually understand this truth well enough to try to explain it to the rest of the world when they proclaim “Stuff Happens.” It does, and that little fact of life can be very hard to accept.
Perhaps it all boils down to an exaggerated truth. Regardless of an individual’s determination, hard work, or beliefs, there is a degree to which no one is in complete control of what goes into their lives. Fortunately, it is another fact of life, and just as important, that life goes on, and what is dark today will be bright tomorrow or the day after.
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