Owen’s known for a long time that God put him in my belly. What can I say? The kid asks questions and I cop out — isn’t that the way it’s done? I’m hardly having a sex talk with my then-three-year-old, and Owen’s such a science geek that he’d eat up that version of the conversation. So I stuck with God.
And God’s stuck with me, until last night, when, for a brief moment, I thought He’d forsaken me. During our endless trips up and down the stairs at bedtime, Keith came down to the kitchen and said it was my turn to go up, because Owen had a question for me. He was wondering how Luke and Leia got in Queen Amidala‘s tummy. Taking another trip down cop-out lane, I told Keith to go back up and tell him God put them there.
Keith snorted at me in disbelief, but went upstairs to do it anyway. He left me thinking, though, as I scrubbed the little brown bits off the Le Creuset, why Owen bothered to ask that question. Was he starting to doubt my answer? Was there more going on in his amazing kid brain than I gave him credit for? Was he watching The Discovery Channel, or maybe Animal Planet? Or maybe he’d just forgotten how babies get in tummies, and needed a reminder (which then had me worried that his brain was leaking).
Just then, Keith came downstairs, laughing. When Keith told Owen that God put Luke and Leia in Queen Amidala’s belly, this is how the rest of the conversation went:
“What? In Star Wars? In space?”
“Yeah, God is everywhere. He’s in space, even in galaxies far, far away.”
“But in Star Wars?”
“Yes, even in Star Wars.”
“But Star Wars is pretend!”
“… Right. So, it’s pretend God … in space.”
“Oh.”
So now Star Wars has a new, pretend God, that puts pretend babies in pretend characters’ bellies. And that satisfies Owen … for now.
