I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

Children are so talented at asking unanswerable questions, questions that cut you to the quick.

I remember driving around with my daughter Violet when she was in preschool, just three or four years old,

and she would ask me these enormous existential questions from her booster

seat behind me. I still remember the questions as clearly as if she asked them yesterday.

What is the world for? And what is the past? And why is the sky so tall and over everything?

My personal favorite was this one. How do leaves fall off the trees and how did God build this

car? I mean, where to even begin? Sometimes I'd catch her eyes in the rearview mirror and just think,

who is this kid? But she also, especially as she got a little older, six, seven, eight,

started to ask questions that were even harder to answer because they were more

personal. Are you going to die before me? And where will you be when you die? Parents have been

struggling to answer questions about mortality since the beginning of time. Sometimes the questions our

children ask are even harder to navigate because they are about the world we live in, the world

we brought them to. My daughter asked questions about 9-11 and wars and natural disasters and other parts of human history

that are difficult to parse no matter how old you are. As a parent, it feels like an impossible

task, telling the truth, or at least the truth as you know it, and not saying anything that will

sadden or flat out terrify your children. We don't get any training in how to have these conversations.

If you end up parenting a very philosophical kid, you have to learn to think on the fly.

I'm not sure I always answered those questions to my daughter's satisfaction, but I did my

best, and as a poet, I often ended up writing my way through those big ideas.

Poems are the perfect containers for questions without easy answers.

Today's poem made my breath catch in my throat

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