Bye Bye Evil
“I can’t be myself”. “I can’t be the person I want to be”.
Filly knew that “herself” that Tater was talking about, was a good and innocent child.
The words kept appearing in her thoughts at midnight as she tried to go back to sleep. The diet coke. She had a diet coke and now she was wide awake. She had known better and now, sleep evaded her, so Filly got back up and padded into the bathroom to brush her teeth, because earlier she had been too tired and had gone to bed after eating almonds and her teeth had almonds stuck in every inch of her mouth.
“I know exactly what you mean about not being able to be good” Filly thought to herself, remembering her conversation with Tater and Mister earlier in the evening.
The two of them had been watching the Grinch Live. Filly had tried to tell them, that in the original story of the Grinch by Dr. Seuss, the grinch was BAD. And the Who, down in Whoville, were GOOD. When the grinch was bad, The Who kept on being good. They were able to do this because they stuck together as a community, the way a church does.
But in the new show, a re=make of the Grinch, He was bad, not like in the original story, but because many of the Who were bad TO him FIRST. So he was retaliating.
Filly pointed out to Tater, that retaliation was not something the Who did in the original story. She pointed out that sometimes movies, tried to make bad people (or grinches) good, and good people “bad” so that truth was “relative”, instead of good and bad being concrete concepts. But truth was not relative. Truth was concrete and Truth was good.
But in the remake, truth WAS relative and the grinch was not really bad any more and the Who were not really good any more, each of them was somewhere in the middle and they all were the same.
Just NO. Filly rejected that “remake”. She tried to explain that bad was something that was easy to discern, like in the first show of the grinch, and that if a person kept close to God like The Who down in Whoville, and Good also was something easy to discern. (UNLIKE the W.H.O. and covid)
Filly then said that when good people spent too much time being around people who did bad things, then the good people tended to take on the behaviors of their associates, and they became more like the bad people instead of being good. Filly said that it was really important to spend time around people who were doing good things and friend choices were crucial.
That was when Tater said that she could not be herself. The idea was really concerning to Filly, because Tater was only eight, and the struggles she had were real and difficult for someone her age.
Mister, sitting beside her in his car seat, seemed to be actually more stoic in this regard because seemed to have an easier time taking the high road, regarding friends, but at the same time, he was lonely because the high road was not very popular. Mister seemed to be ok with not being so popular, and he did in fact have friends. But Tater wanted to have a “bestie” and said that everyone at her school had a person just like them….but that her person she wanted to be just like, who was her bestie, was her dad.
She continued that she liked to make people laugh (and Filly imagined Tater’s dad walking around pretending to be like a dinosaur and understood how compellingly funny her dad was). But then Tater said that the kids at school laughed at her when she was not trying to be funny and also when she was trying to be funny and even when she was lying down on the floor in the lunch room because she was “stressed out” because of something bad. She then told Filly that lunch was her most stressful time of the day. Filly did not like imagining Tater lying on the floor stressed out and kids laughing at her, not realizing she was stressed.
Filly told her to talk to God during that time. “God is always there”, Filly said, and “having your dad as your bestie is a great person to pick”, she added.”You can’t go wrong with him” she added.
But within the context of the conversation, about the Grinch, Filly knew that Tater was telling her that sometimes she was doing bad things because of her friends which made her stressed out, and she was stressed out also because she did not know how to fit in without compromising herself. Really big issues for just third grade. Things parents are really good at helping kids navigate, but parents are not there in elementary school. Which was why half of the family members she knew had decided to home school their children instead of public school because they wanted to have more of a role in their kids development of a moral compass.
This though was what was keeping Filly awake and distressed.
Fitting in, was not a Christian value, and Christian values did not seem to be a priority in schools any more. So many stories in the bible were about how to resist evil.
Maybe Filly would get Tater a compass, and talk about how God was like the needle pointing true north. Maybe if Tater held on to that compass, and understood the analogy, she would understand how to pick the right directions when times were tough.
“Phone”, “Phone” Mister said. He wanted her to give him her phone while they were driving. The phone appeared to be his solution to not fitting in and he wanted to immerse himself in the virtual world of electronics. Maybe he could benefit from a compass too.
When they were at McDonalds, earlier though, instead of giving him the phone, Filly had an animated conversation with Mister. They talked about his new friend Macy. They talked about whether or not they should go get a tree and they talked about going to their cousin’s birthday party. Filly kept the conversation going and Mister seemed to enjoy it.
But it was at McDonald’s that Filly ordered diet coke. Just like Tater, she was “not being herself”. She had done so well stopping drinking coke and diet coke, and yet here she was, the moment she was eating a cheeseburger, she did not resist drinking the soda. And it made her stomach feel sick later. She felt not only remorse, she felt that she was setting a terrible example for Tater and Mister.
“I know what you mean Tater” Filly had said about “not being yourself”. “Sometimes if you do not want to be stressed out, you have to leave a place that you are at” she added.
Filly thought that she should probably not have gone inside to McDonalds herself if she could not resist drinking coke. But she did not talk about herself in the moment, instead she talked about her friends in college. She talked about how when she was in a room where everyone wanted to do something bad with smoking, she got up and left. And right after she left someone had banged on the door saying they were the police.
“Did they go to jail” Tater asked.
“No” Filly said. “They got a ticket”. “Sometimes if a person has not done any thing bad and it is the first time they do something bad, they do not go to jail they get a ticket”.
Now at midnight, rethinking the conversation, Filly wished she had acknowledged her own weakness with the soda, to Tater. She wished she had stopped the truck and given the little girl a hug. Tater had even gone so far to say that “difficult conversations like these were very hard for her”. She was a very perceptive little girl. And Filly, at midnight, was crying at the thought of her very palatable struggles.
Parents and family never wanted to see children have to struggle against evil. It is one thing to struggle to learn to tie a shoe, or to learn to put on a dress, or to learn to write, but to struggle against temptation is what parents are best equipped to help children with, not other children.
Filly believed that was why children were born into families, not into governments or schools. Tater, Filly hoped, would learn about saying no to evil, by practicing self denial, something that she had learned as a child during advent. When a child can get good at self denial, and giving up something they love, it will strengthen them when they have to say no to a friend who wants them to do something bad. Filly remembered putting a straw in the manger each time that she did something good, and the manger would be soft for the baby Jesus to be born into. It was almost Christmas…she needed to put straw out for the kids to earn for the manger.
And in the meantime, thinking of the drive back home, Filly also knew that Mister, would not get much spiritual enlightenment by looking at you tube videos. She knew that he wanted to know about the world, but she did not want him to have the perspective of strangers who did not necessarily have Christian values so she did not let him watch things on the phone this day. And when he had watched things in the past…he was monitored because she watched with him.
Filly decided she wanted to burn a CD of herself reading stories to the two of them, so that they could listen to something they had not heard, perhaps at night, and could learn values that helped them stay away from evil situations and evil friends, who would take them down the wrong path if they were not shunned.
But because of their struggles, Filly knew she would have to be better in her own life, at saying no, and being a role model, when she said she would say no. And that included drinking Diet Coke.
The next time, she decided she would talk to Tater and say, “I Really want a Coke, but I know when I drink it, that it is not giving me any nutrition, and also it makes my stomach hurt later so I am going to say no to having a coke” She was going to verbalize it.
“I am going to get in the habit of drinking water and I know I will feel better later and will also be healthier because of that”. She thought of her aunt, who had died surrounded by diet coke liter bottles and orange pill bottles of pharmaceuticals. Yikes. Filly knew all she needed to know about a lifetime of caving into temptation from watching other people.
And she was going to make sure that Tater had a good example of how happy and good a person COULD BE, and how they could be who they wanted to be and COULD avoid being stressed out. She was going to lead by example. And diet coke was not only NOT worth it, it was profiting off of her weakness. NO THANK YOU. bye bye diet coke and soft drinks, forever…Hello WHO WE WANT TO BE.
And regarding the confusion between good and bad, she had picked a bible verse…randomly. Daniel chapter nine verse seven…