long before bedtime

Last night, while I was reading one of their bedtime books, City Mouse and Country Mouse, Jack and Liam got in an argument. I sit between their beds when I read and since I was red-eyed tired, the quarrel barely registered in my consciousness. It was not a wildly passionate argument, more of a run of the mill difference of opinion. I was not really listening to the content or details of their disagreement, which had something to do with the workings of a mousetrap, but instead just sort of mentally spacing out waiting for the break and calm that would signal I could keep reading, finish the book and finally get them to bed. I heard my voice make a few auto-piloted efforts to smooth things over and move things along. And then I heard Liam cry out, “Just like Baby Jesus!”

Well that caught my attention. Just for the record, Jesus is referred to only as “Baby Jesus” by Jack and Liam. While I was raised Catholic, religion has not exactly become a formal institution in our household, much to my parents’ dismay. Oban was raised Hippie and I have become, more or less, the kind of person I recall being so frowned upon in mass as a child; the holiday Catholic. When we took Jack and Liam to mass on Mother’s Day this year, it was the first time they had been in a church since my grandfather’s funeral mass in January. Jesus, in my boys’ experience, was the very special baby born on Christmas, the one in the nativity scenes and the one so many Christmas carols are about. However, in the church on Mother’s Day, my five year old boys were suddenly and totally transfixed by the violent images of the Stations of the Cross.

“Who’s that bloody guy, Mama?” Liam shouted out in the middle of the Mass.

“That’s Jesus,” I said, uncomfortably. Liam looked at me like I was either kidding or crazy.

“Not the baby Jesus. the grown up Jesus,” I whispered.

“What are they doing to him, Mama?” Liam asked pointing to an image of Jesus being nailed to the cross, to which I stuttered and stammered for a while until Jack asked, “How old to we have to be to watch Jesus the Movie, Mama?”

And despite that conversation in a crowded pew, which really only grew messier and trickier as it went on, they apparently still refer to Jesus, the good guy who got nailed to a cross by the mean guys, as Baby Jesus. I looked down at the book in my lap. There was a picture of a mousetrap. City Mouse was showing Country Mouse how to steal a piece of cheese from it, much to Country Mouse’s shock and horror. Jack and Liam were arguing over the workings of the mousetrap, trying to figure how the trap would actually kill the mouse. Liam felt he had won the argument by surmising that the mouse would be pinned down by the metal bars, in a crucifixion fashion, and left to die, “just like Baby Jesus.”

“Right, Mama?” Liam asked.

Trying to take Baby Jesus out of it, I explained how a mouse trap is triggered and agreed that yes, the mouse would likely either be squished and killed by the metal bar or at least trapped by it until it died, which proved to be an adequately gruesome explanation and sent them spinning into a few seconds of thankfully quiet, enraptured contemplation.

“And that’s why Country Mouse doesn’t want to live in the city, even if he has to eat yucky roots,” Jack said after a while.

“ Yes, I suppose that’s right,” I said, and then I finished reading the story.