The question no sort-of Roman Catholic wants to hear from their child...

Forget that talk about the birds and bees. Been there, done that, it's a walk in the park compared to this little doozy.

"Mummy. Who made us?"

For chrissake. What kind of a question is that to throw at your mother when you're only 10 minutes into a 2 1/2 hour car journey?

It's funny, but it's entirely possible for a grown adult to blindly just bumble along, affiliated with one belief or another, not really speaking out about anything that they don't agree with because, well, they did that whole thing when they were very much younger and after a significant investigation process of alternative systems, decided to stick with what they knew. Until they have children. And suddenly the sort of prayers and creeds that a person may be happy to blindly recite every Sunday without actually listening to any of the words (or is that just me?) are suddenly put in the glare of the spotlight and found wanting when you realise you are supposed to pass this belief structure onto your 6 year old child....

Initally though, being Roman Catholic, when asked the question above, I couldn't help myself. Generations of conditioning kicked in and quick as a flash all those catechism classes that - wait for it - I never actually went to (because I didn't grow up in the Dark Ages) came back from the far distant past and took control. Without even thinking about it I replied "God made us." And then I nearly crashed car. What on earth was I saying? Because whilst I do believe that some higher being certainly had a hand in his creation, I would also like equal billing - if not top billing - to be given to Boy #1's father and myself.

So I back-tracked somewhat, and threw in a brief reference or two to myself and Husband being involved in making him, too. When that proved not to answer his real question of how human beings came to be in the first place, we then moved on to a brief discussion of Darwin's theory of evolution. I also suggested that God was probably standing around passing Mother Nature the odd test tube and keeping the temperature of the laboratory at optimimum for successful development whilst she beavered away in the 'Human Project.'

Overall I think I was about as clear as mud. I know this because Boy #1 has decided that unlike the rest of us he is not most probably descended from a species of ape. He is, of course, the ultimate progeny of some highly evolved lion.

You might think that was enough for one car journey - but there was no way I was going to get off that lightly. As Boy #2 slept in his car seat, Boy #1 and I discussed the fact that different people believe different things about God, and sometimes in different gods entirely, and sometimes not in any god at all, and that none of these beliefs are any better or worse than each other, they are just different.

He then decided to lighten the mood a little and moved onto the signposts in cemetaries (headstones, to you and I), whether it was necessary to have a license to be a grave digger or could anyone just go in with a spade, and what the police would do to you if you did (I believe Boy #1's recieved wisdom on this one was that beheading would be the probable outcome).

Then, just to round things off nicely, we touched on burial vs cremation and the fact that of course it doesn't really matter to the person who's died what happens to their body because it is, after all, just a body once their spirit is no longer present, and...

...crikey, this child-rearing game can be hard work.

I'm off now to google 'antidisestablishmentarianism', the roots of Marxism, and to bone up on the great schism of the Roman and Orthodox churches in 1054AD.

We've got another long car journey coming up soon, and me and Baden Powell? We like to be prepared...