My barely-informed, unprofessional guess is that your DD is experiencing some pretty significant trust issues. I've experienced this with my own DD7, when she thought DW and I were responsible for her placement in an age-level school grade, instead of an appropriate ability-level one. She went into meltdown mode on a regular basis, wished she was dead, hit herself (not too hard, thankfully), etc. It was only when we'd convinced her that we'd been vigorously opposed to the placement from the beginning that we saw improvement (in her behavior... nothing has improved at school, but that's another topic).
Like your child, my DD believes that good behavior is very important, and the conflict came from trying to behave for people she seriously doubted had her best interests in mind. As a child she's powerless, and without someone she can trust looking out for her, she also felt quite hopeless.
My determination of trust issues in your case are based on these signals:
- She is wishing/praying for things and they're never coming true. She's testing information she has received in this way, and the result is false.
- The "one minute" comment, which says she is catching you saying things you don't literally mean.
- The comment that you don't care to explain "the meaning of life" to her satisfaction. Apparently that's pretty important to her at the moment, and by ignoring it you're inadvertently telling her that she's not important.
In this case, the solution is to earn her trust back, which can be a difficult proposition... trust is easily lost but not easily won. For "one minute," I'd try to avoid that statement in the future, but rather explain, "After I've finished doing X." I'd also explain how it's a figure of speech, and not to be interpreted literally, for those situations where you slip and use it again.
As for the big questions of God and the meaning of life... it sounds like you don't spend a lot of time thinking about this subject too much, but it's very important to your DD right now. Your DD is raising some very good points, and she needs someone to answer them in a way that makes sense for her. If that's not you, maybe you can bring her to someone else who can.
A few other comments:
- Wishing she was a baby again is a perfectly natural behavior at that age. In our DD's case, we dealt with this mostly by reminding her of all the cool stuff she can do now that she couldn't do as a baby. And... every once in a while, we regress to playing baby again. She loves it.
- The feeling of being rushed may mean that she's over-scheduled. My DD started doing that when she over-scheduled herself, with a different extra-curricular activity Monday - Saturday. We enforced a cut-back and made more time for free play, which is what she really wanted. Nowadays, as long as she gets some play time at the end of the day, whatever else happened during the day, she's cool. Free play is extremely important in child development.
- Another possibility for that sense of being rushed is that she feels like she has no control. The solution here is to provide an array of choices, rather than choosing for her.
