My kids love to draw. They are always setting up shop at the kitchen table. Commandeering the place we eat for their own artistic creations.

Some days it feels like the floor is permanently littered with colored pencils and markers. Every night when the whole family cleans the house after dinner, we always discover some stragglers.

The other day, our son accidentally whacked his sister in the face when they were playing outside. She cried pretty bad. He’s such a good kid, he didn’t mean to.

An orange pencil under the piano. A green crayon at the bottom of the laundry. A blue marker in the bathroom. How the hell did a marker get in the bathroom? Oh, someone drew on the wall.

Ferocious beasts

The kids draw all sorts of things. Cars, trucks, animals, people, our family. They also try to draw scary pictures. They draw monsters. They draw ferocious beasts with big claws. But they can’t draw scary faces. They don’t shake me. They don’t send a shiver up my spine or make me want to look away. They make me smile in a terribly sad way.

Kids just can’t draw scary faces. And why is that? They try and try, but they can’t. A vampire with a little fang hanging out of his mouth. The other side of his lips curl up in a little smile. His eyes are a little misshapen and asymmetrical. His face is soft and funny. Kind and cute. It was the scariest thing my son could draw, and it wasn’t scary at all.

He excitedly shows us his drawing, and we pretend to be scared. “Ooohhh that is scary! A vampire!” But we aren’t scared. I feel that lump in my throat. It’s a rush of confusing feelings that all come at the same time, and I can’t explain any of them. And truthfully, I don’t want to either. This boiling hot ball of feeling makes me feel so good and so bad. I am so happy and so sad.

A very long time

Kids can’t draw scary faces because they haven’t seen scary things. They haven’t seen a scary world. They are innocent. They are pure. They live in the world that we create for them. We protect them. We don’t tell them scary things, and we don’t show them scary movies. When they ask when we are going to die, we tell them that we aren’t going to die for a very long time and that they don’t have to worry about that.

Their world is sweet and kind. Simple. Even when they are mad, they don’t know how mad you can really be. The knob goes all the way up to 10, but they think it only goes to 3.

'Even when I'm old'

The other day, our son accidentally whacked his sister in the face when they were playing outside. She cried pretty bad. He’s such a good kid, he didn’t mean to. He said that he’s never going to forget it. “Even when I’m old, I’m going to remember it,” he said.

They read old books and old fairy tales. There are scary drawings of witches and giants. My son is currently obsessed with dragons. He has this red toy dragon that he loves. It looks pretty fierce. It has a split tongue that sticks out through razor sharp teeth.

But still, he can’t translate that onto paper. He can’t draw a scary face. They are always cute. They are always happy. The world as he feels it betrays what he aims to draw.

We can’t be someone we are not. We can’t feel something we don’t know. They can’t draw scary faces because they don’t know them. They don’t feel them. They aren’t them. They are innocent. They are small. They are sweet.

We, on the other hand, are sullied. We are corrupted. We are conniving. We are ugly and hateful. We are liars and cheats. Children remind us that we are not, in fact, good. It’s easy for me to draw a scary face. Just give me a pencil.

Layer after layer

We hang all their pictures around the kitchen. We have a line of string lights that run from one wall to another. We hang them up there. My God, there are so many dangling, barely holding on under the weak pressure of these little micro-clothespins. We keep adding to our collection every day. They keep bringing them to us. Layer after layer on top of one another.

The world is tragic. Things go so wrong. Why do they have to go so wrong? I don’t know. But when I see those little drawings, I smile somewhere inside. Their little hands drew those little faces. They try so hard to make them scary. But they can’t, and it’s adorable, and I love them for it.

I stare at them, and I think of how different I am than they are. How much worse I am. And, of course, they make me so sad because they aren’t going to be innocent forever. They will eventually grow up and see a scary world, and they will know how to draw scary faces.