“What did I do, father?” “Was I there, too, mother?”
Then begins the mystery. And the lies told by the parents in answer to these simple questions are shameful to hear. Father and mother smile slyly at each other and reply:
“Oh, no, dearie, you were not there.”
“Where was I, then?” the child insists.
Another sly look passes between the parents and the lies begin.
“You were in heaven,” or “among the flowers, etc.”
“How did I get HERE, then?” continues the small questioner, who is in quest of information concerning THE most important subject in the child world, the “I.”
Then of course, the reply comes that the stork or the angels, or oftimes the doctor brought him. However, any answer will do which will delude the child’s mind and keep him, as the parents say, “innocent.”
Now let us see what happens. This little child is beginning to think. He has received brand new information, something fully as wonderful and mysterious as Santa Claus, and he loves to think about it and talk about it, too.
He goes again to mother (father is not always around) and besieges her with questions, and she all in ignorance of the harm she is doing him, becomes so entangled in this mesh of lies that she becomes cross, or impatient, and stops his eager questions by sending him out to play to divert his attention to some other subject. But his attention is not long diverted before he returns to this subject, and if his walk is taken with an aunt or nurse he continues to ask questions, and to his even greater surprise, the aunt or nurse, not knowing what the parent has told him, tells him what she thinks. This will very likely be an entirely different story from that his parents told him, and so he begins to realize that there is some secrecy, which no one will explain, and he becomes determined to find out the meaning of it all.