I think it's wise to hide some things from the kids. Honesty should be upheld, but full disclosure is not always appropriate.
Sometimes there is no way to hide things from a child who is so perceptive that it almost seems he can read my mind.
We couldn't hide anything when my husband had cancer surgery and radiation treatment that caused my husband's face to look like he had been severely burned and the worst affected area would sometimes start bleeding for no reason. For five years, every time he would go in for a check up I couldn't hide the fact that I was terrified the cancer had come back. I have trouble getting that mental picture of my husband's radiation treatment out of my mind when I am screened for cancer.
I can't shield my son from the awful reality of what happened to my mother and how she went into surgery and came out with her hernia fixed but with extreme memory loss and dementia that has progressed now to the point that she doesn't remember me or her husband and needs 24 hour care. We live next door to her. We take care of her when my dad has to leave for any reason. A nursing home would cost $4,000 a month and my dad lost a lot of money he had saved. In real life people find a way to do what they have to do. I think my son is learning some difficult life lessons from all of this, more than the average homeschooled kid has to learn.
My dad and I both go online looking for answers because we don't completely trust doctors any more after what happened to my mother. My dad asked his doctor for a test that he read about online. The doctor hadn't suggested it at his regular checkup. The test showed a problem and he had to have immediate surgery to put in a stent. So my son has heard us talk about the need for educating ourselves so we can ask the right questions and hopefully get appropriate medical care.
I couldn't shield my son from the fact that doctors could not help my mother or stop the anxiety that caused her to pull almost all of her hair out or other behaviors that I had never seen anyone else have. When you are very sensitive and have a problem with automatically imagining what a person in pain is feeling and that person is your mother, it causes a great deal of anxiety. I could not hide it from my son. There was nothing we could do and that is a horrible feeling. I couldn't shield him from the fact that relatives stopped coming over to visit as often because they found it so difficult to see my mother but my young son had to deal with it. He not only did it but he always spoke to her with kindness and compassion and respect and he was able to make her laugh sometimes and distract her from her anxiety for a short time. It was wonderful to see her laugh even if just for a few seconds.
I can't shield my son from the fact that my mother is in the last stage of this horrible thing and there is a possibility she could just pass away at home and I know my dad will have a very hard time with this. It is hard to see my dad look like he is going to cry when we talk about the inevitable. I can keep it together when I am at my parents' house but the minute I get home I am worn out and sad. I am not a very good actor. My son tries extra hard to distract me and make me laugh at these times and I tell him all the time how much that means to me.
I couldn't shield my son from my uncle's comments recently when he finally came to visit and saw her do things that he should not have told us about, that we didn't need to know because we see enough of it already and it is disrespectful. I said something to my uncle about it and he told me it was a "fact of life" and it was okay to talk about it even in front of my 10 year old.
When my aunt visited, she talked about how she used to work at a hospital and she knew of doctors that were not very good, that would perform medical procedures for the money instead of the well-being of their patients. How do do you if you have a good doctor if you have to go to a military clinic and you see different doctors each time and sometimes you can't understand them because they are from a different country and their English is hard to understand.
My son has seen way to many of these "facts of life" and when I see people who don't know my son give him a hard time for his sensitivities and motor disability I just get very angry and I know I will just have to find a way to accept it. My son does. My husband even says that our son handles things better than I do. My son read psychology and sociology books in his quest to understand what was going on around him. He doesn't even think bullies are totally bad people. He tries to imagine what happened in their lives to cause them to behave the way they do.
