Does Knowing Make It Better?
12:30pm on a Monday and I’m filling time before taking Son to the neurologist. The migraine fairy, who did not spare Daughter, has likewise not spared Son; and they are becoming less well-controlled as puberty progresses. Eleven migraines since December, sixteen missed school days since September, and it’s time and more than time to tweak the treatments.
This is an annoyance for me: I don’t like to see the kids hurting, and I don’t like hassling with the schools over attendance, and I don’t like having to constantly take off work and chase down doctors. But at least this time through it’s not a terror. When Daughter started having trouble with what was at the time a ‘mystery illness’ – since her migraines did not act like classic migraines and therefore got missed for years – we were baffled, concerned and frustrated. When, at age twelve, she added a sudden symptom range also found in people with brain tumors, we were flat terrified. What a relief it was to learn it was something that could be managed and wasn’t going to kill her. And now, with Son, I at least know the enemy. Knowing makes it better…in this case.
Of course, for parents, there are other cases in which ignorance is bliss – maybe not the best bliss, but bliss nonetheless. First time a parent friend of mine found drug paraphernalia in the son’s room, or another parent friend found a condom under the daughter’s bed, they got drop-kicked out the garden door closed forever behind them: never again could they say, ‘Not My Kid’. It was there kid, same as it was and is all their friends’ kids; only, unlike their friends, they Know. Does knowing make it better? And what about for their kids, who couldn’t wait to leave innocence behind them and threw themselves headlong out of the garden and into experience? They wanted to know – how drugs felt, what was the big deal about sex; now they know. Does knowing make it better?
When Daughter was about three years old, she overheard me preparing a paper for one of my seminary ethics classes. The topic was human cloning, and I was talking with Husband about it. Keen ears combined with preschool filters resulted in Daughter going to daycare the next day and getting her classmates all upset because “some people wanted to put some other people in the copier, and it’s bad to go in the copier”. Daycare teacher was not too pleased with me, huffing emphatically that there was such a thing as too much information. Perhaps in this case the garbled message was ‘too soon’ information. Knowing and understanding are not the same thing.
“For now we see as through a glass, darkly.” Paul the Apostle summed up human perception just that succinctly: we know, but not everything. Sometimes we know just enough to madden us, even make us dangerous as our knowledge outpaces our ethics and our ‘We Can’ outpaces our ‘Should We’. We see the garden door of innocence slam shut behind us, but we don’t see any roadmap ahead of us. We know, or think we know, what was; but we don’t know what’s to be and sometimes we don’t even know what is. Does knowing make it better? Are you the type who’d rather look under the bed at night to see what made the noise?
Mad God Woman
