Daddy Is Tired

My kids’ school, particularly my 5yo’s class, has been reading about Martin Luther King for a week.  My daughter would come home telling me about how he was a great man.  How he wanted everyone to be nice to each other.  How we were all equal.  And how one day, a bad man shot him at a hotel.

“In an hour, Martin was dead,” she told me.

This past week we’ve had lots of talks about why someone would want to kill him, but it’s hard to explain to a 5 year old how “the bad man killed Dr. King because he didn’t like what Dr. King was saying.  He didn’t think we were all equal.”  She just doesn’t understand.

So I try to explain that back then, some of the kids in her school wouldn’t be allowed to go.  Some of the teachers wouldn’t be allowed to teach her.  And (fortunately) she doesn’t get it.  She said, “But they’re nice people.  Why wouldn’t they want them to play with me?”

Exactly.

So last Friday, on his birthday, she decided that “Martin” needed a birthday card.  The more she talked about it, she wanted to make a birthday poster instead.  When she was done she taped it up, and we love it.

That's a picture of MLK, the birthday message, and a smiley-face balloon.

Coincidentally, today at lunch she asked me if girls could marry girls and boys could marry boys.  She’s asked that before, and I did the same thing I’ve done in the past.  I lied and told her yes, on the assumption that one day this country will pull its head out of its ass.  One day people will realize that gay rights are civil rights, and that MLK was fighting for that as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Kids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.