Today Rahul called from school. He was worried about the cheetos and pretzels he had eaten regularly in middle school. (We had gotten a whole box of mixed snack bags from Costco and he used to take one to school every day). He wanted to know if it was good fat or bad fat, whether it was going to make him sick, whether is is as good or bad as cake (he has somehow decided that cake is not so healthy but OK), whether it increased his chance of dying at a young age and whether he still had a 99.9999 percent chance of not dying at a young age.
Now this is not a random set of questions. His questioning almost always follows this sequence with each question in the sequence repeated multiple times in different ways. You have to be careful, sometimes the answer is "Yes" and sometimes "No". The wrong answer can end up prolonging the conversation indefinitely. The "99.9999 percent" question is always the last one. To that I always respond with a resounding "YES".
It worries me sometimes that I play along and give him the exact answers that he wants. I do it partly because I don't want him to mess up his good record in school by getting upset and partly because I want to end the conversation soon and get on with whatever else I was doing. One excuse I have is that he doesn't call too often - today was probably just the third day this school year. Also, when he asks these questions at home sometimes I give more qualified answers like "it depends", "it's a matter of quantity" (not for the "99.9999 percent" question, for that one I never risk anything other than a "yes"). I still feel a little guilty because I remember Dr. Pihlgren (the Cognitive Behavior Therapist) saying that he shouldn't be allowed to get into comfortable ruts like that, he should always be challenged so he's forced to deal with fears. I did say to him one day "Rahul, when I'm gone other people are not going to give you exact answers." I need to do more to wean him out of this.
Today though, there was something else that I noticed while talking to him on the phone. The teacher had allowed him to call but was trying to hurry him and get him to hang up soon. (She doesn't know that he has this entire sequence that he needs to go through slowly.) I noticed that Rahul kept responding to her very patiently "Please can I talk two more minutes?", "I need to finish the conversation", "This is important" etc. In the past he would have whined and screamed and had a meltdown. We did get to the "99.9999 percent" question and I did answer it in the affirmative but the teacher forced him to hang up before he was completely done. He probably wanted to ask that question twice more for good measure. I don't know what happened in school after that. I'm curious. I'll update here when I find out.
UPDATE: Nothing happened. He was fine. He felt like he had ended the conversation.
On the way back from school we talked a bit about this. I explained that there is no way I can know what his exact chance of not dying at a young age is, so from now on I am not going to say yes to the "99.9999 percent" question. He agreed. But he politely requested me to answer the previous question (whether something will increase his chance of dying at a young age) for a while and to let him know in advance when I decide not to answer it anymore. He explained that he gets scared because they say scary things in school about food and other things. I agreed that school wants to scare people but it's not people like him who are already careful about what they eat, the scary information is for people who eat too much junk food. He tried to tease out exactly why he gets worried, tried to come up with alternatives to having his questions answered. I again reminded him that we were all going to die anyway.We went on in this vein all the way home and had a very good conversation which did much to improve mutual understanding.
Even three or four years ago I wouldn't have believed that I could ever have a conversation like this with Rahul. To mothers of young children I say hang in there, keep plodding on, your child will make progress - maybe very very slowly - but they will.
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