Making the Changes

How do you explain time to a six year old girl whose only desire is to see her daddy again? Add to that a learning delay that makes the concept of time abstract at best and bizarre at worst and you’ve got a king-size parenting dilemma.

My husband recently began training to be a truck driver and while that doesn’t sound like a promising career change to most people, it offers better pay and more room for advancement that his former job. This is the reason time has become such a central and difficult concept to my daughter. While trying to explain to her how long her dad will be gone and why, she just looks at me as if I’m speaking a foreign language.

Although this may sound like a degrading comment, I assure you it isn’t - trying to explain to her how long her daddy will be gone is like trying to explain it to our dog. They both just look at me with those big unblinking eyes as if to say, “Yeah, so when is he coming through the door?” No matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get her to see past more than a few hours.

So, at the risk of sounding like a lazy mother, I decided to dump the whole idea of trying to explain days or weeks to her and opted for distracting activities when she gets worried and starts asking for her dad.

I’ve played doctor with her and her baby dolls and I’ve even sunk so low as to resort to cheap physical humor by making myself slip and fall on the floor. She finds this absolutely hysterical and quickly pushes aside her concerns about her daddy.

It’s a coward's way out I know, but I’ve decided I don’t want her dad's new job to be a hard learning experience as well as a sudden change. I figure if I take the opportunity to have some more fun with my daughter, she’ll see this change with happier eyes.

I know I’m not exactly pulling the wool completely over her eyes, because she does realize her dad isn’t coming home at four o’clock every day. She knows things have changed but she doesn’t understand all the grown-up reasons why. I feel she’s really too young for me to even begin to try to explain it.

Kids are intuitive creatures and she knows enough already without me launching into some long, boring explanation. Although she doesn’t have the foggiest idea how long a week is in “kid time”, she knows that her daddy most certainly will walk through the door, it’s just a matter of when. I’ve decided to let it be a wonderful surprise instead of trying to make her agonize over some kind of countdown.

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