‘I have questions,’ my son says, as I pick him up from school. He’s just been on the receiving end of a light scolding from me, because of an email I got from his school. ‘This is to let you know,’ they wrote, ‘that although you have consented for your child to receive the flu nasal spray vaccination, they did not receive it.’
For a few seconds, I entertained the idea that they’d simply run out of vaccines. Or maybe he had been in the bathroom while they were being doled out. I pictured, briefly, these doses being administered by a team of nurses who had another, more pressing, engagement scheduled three minutes later, and thus jabbed the nostrils of everyone in the class in 90 seconds, with the buzzing alacrity of a Formula One pit crew.
Sadly, such hopes were dashed by a pleasant phone call to the school’s office, moments later. ‘It’s OK,’ they told me brightly, ‘it’s just that he didn’t want to do it, so he refused.’
I must admit I was unaware that this was something you could do. As a six-year-old, the idea of refusing to do anything was alien to me. My entire childhood was, I now realise, spent constantly doing things I didn’t want to do, simply because grownups told me. My son has no such overweening sense of adult authority. Where once I was the font of all knowledge, he now considers asking me a question little more than a polite act of preliminary inquiry, before he seeks the actual truth by asking the very same question of the Alexa in our kitchen. He is, in a sense, the platonic idea of a questioning child, a boy who does his own research. In some sense, I admire this independence of nature, I just wish it wasn’t on a topic that might make his teachers think I’m feeding him a nonstop diet of Infowars at home.
‘If I’m not sick, why do I need it?’ he asks me on the walk home, and I try to explain both cause and effect, and the linear nature of time, to a six-year-old who’s becoming more conspiratorial by the second. I tell him he did actually have the flu once, when he was very little, and that I’ve had it several times, in fact it’s interesting to point out that… ‘How bad is it?’ he says, cutting me off. I ponder where on the scale between ‘It’s like a very, very bad cold’ and ‘17-50 million people died of one outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918’ I should pitch my answer.
‘It’s horrible,’ I tell him, ‘you feel weak and sore and rubbish – and this spray will stop you from getting it again.’
‘So the flu is worse than getting water up your nose?’ he asks, once we arrive at home. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s significantly worse than getting water up your nose.’
‘Hmm,’ he says. His brow knits as he thinks for a moment. I feel I’ve got through to him and that maybe some semblance of my authority has been restored. ‘Alexa,’ he shouts, breaking all such illusions, ‘is getting the flu worse than getting water up your nose?’
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