Free Raising Cubby by John Elder Robison

that toy! I don’t want a nap!)
have been learned, they move on to calmer and quieter philosophical issues. Sure enough, one day Cubby reached the stage where he asked the Big Question: “Where did I come from?”
    Where indeed? There were many possible answers, some more interesting than others. Some people say, “God brought you to us.” Unfortunately, that didn’t answer anything.
If God brought me, who is he and where did he get me?
A religious person might answer,
God created you
, but I’m a rational guy, and, knowing the sperm-egg thing, I could not in good conscience use the God explanation.
    Cubby’s mom substituted her own fanciful creature, saying, “The stork brought you.” But Cubby didn’t seem to find that explanation especially satisfying either. The very idea of a bird carrying him around was troubling, to say the least. He might have beendropped from a great height! In any case, his mother often contradicted her explanation a few seconds later by saying, “You came from Mom and Dad.” That answer didn’t work either, because no tyke can possibly conceive how he might come from Mom and Dad, even though that’s true. Even to a three-year-old, Mom and Dad are two distinct individuals, so how could they produce a kid? Was it like baking a cake?
    If I had been a more dedicated parent, I might have tried to explain the science of procreation, but I wasn’t. Instead, I turned to the familiar. I knew Cubby needed an explanation that made sense, one his thousand-day-old brain could comprehend. That is exactly what I found at the place every middle-class suburban toddler in America comes to know and love: the mall.
    Even before Cubby could talk, he accompanied his mom and me to the Holyoke Mall, where we bought goods of various sorts. Cubby saw food taken from grocery store shelves and placed in our refrigerator, only to be eaten a short while later. He saw a crib carried home in a box, to be erected for his containment and pleasure. He saw books put in shopping bags, to be read to him on the living room sofa.
    Almost every single thing that came into our house came from some kind of store. Cubby reached that conclusion early on. He even figured out that we went to stores in the car, which was fueled by gas I bought at filling stations. I know he understood filling stations and gas, because two of the first words he learned to say were
BP
and
Mobil
. And when he learned to read signs a few months later, the first one he read said:
Michelob
. It’s always been a mystery to me how he read that sign, which glowed red neon in the window of the gas station we visited every couple of days. I do not drink beer and never buy Michelob, but somehow Cubby picked up that word.
    By his third birthday, Cubby was well on his way to reading signs, using stuff, and understanding commerce. He did notgrasp the finer points of business yet, but he definitely understood that we had to buy an item before eating it or using it at home. That was particularly true at the grocery store, where Cubby had already learned not to get caught eating food directly off the shelves.
    Buying toys was something he (and I) understood all too well. Of course, Cubby had no idea how much things cost, where the money to pay for them came from, or how it was exchanged. All he knew was, we went to stores, gathered up stuff, and brought it home.
    That made understanding his origin very simple, when I got around to explaining it.
    “I bought you at the Kid Store.”
    “Really?” Cubby digested that answer with puzzlement and wonder. No matter how many times he repeated the question, I answered it the same way. Yet he kept circling back, time and again.
    “That’s where you came from,” I repeated in a tone that didn’t brook any argument. I had to be careful to answer firmly and quickly so he would not sense uncertainty, which opened the door to competing explanations, like his mother’s stork story or even the “growing inside Mom”