Jesus explained

My oldest son has a hard time getting his head around religion and all it’s complexities.
I believe they subtly introduce God and religion in his primary school early on and try and break it down for their young minds to understand.
Unfortunately Daniel hasn’t really grasped the concept and I am absolutely clueless to help him, having, may God forgive me, spent most of our teenage years standing outside mass chatting.
I overheard him explaining the whole God thing to his younger brother.
Daniel: “Jesus, right, he died. But he wasn’t shot or anything. He died from working too much”
Caolan: “What? Like mammy?”
Daniel: “No. He didn’t work on a computer, he made stuff.”
Caolan: “What like?”
Daniel: “He made nice things, like Disneyland and cream buns.”
Caolan: “And was he a baby forever?”
Daniel: “No he was just a baby when he was baby Jesus, then he got big and now he is invisible.”
Caolan: “And what other super powers does he have, can he shoot lasers from his eyes?”
Daniel: “I think so, and he also has a beard”.
Caolan: “Where does he live?”
Daniel: “Dublin.”

I know that little boys are made from snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails but when I signed up to be a mother of three boys I knew nothing of the muck and yuck that came with them.
I arrived at the nursery to pick up my middle son to find him sitting in the middle of a muck pit digging with his hands. He came rushing over with what I thought was a little cute daisy for me in his hands. It wasn’t a pretty flower but a big, juicy worm that I instinctively flung from his hand in a millisecond. Turned out this worm had been his companion all afternoon and he had become somewhat sentimentally attached to it – he called him John. Therefore he took exception to me propelling his mate 10 ft up in the air, way over a fence and onto the roof of the credit union next door.
The screeching only stopped when I promised I’d send Daddy up on the roof after work to rescue John and place him back in his soily home.
We got into the car and made our way home. Caolan seemed at ease with John’s rescue plan. When we reached the roundabout near our house Caolan put his clenched fist over beside my face and told me that he had kept another friend – he called her Mary – a far superior, fatter, juicier, wrigglier worm than John. He had kept her safe in his pocket since lunchtime in school.
If you were in the vicinity of the Strand Road roundabout in Derry at around 2pm last Friday and you witnessed what you thought was a deranged woman, screeching while going round the roundabout three times, I apologise. I was using screaming as a medium to express horror about having a big worm dropped on my lap. The screaming, I found, was also useful in helping me fashion a plan of action. That plan, unfortunately for Mary, meant flinging the thing out the window into traffic.
This column is dedicated to the memory of John and Mary Worm. RIP.