Sarcasm can make for great storytelling, until you make her cry

With every story we read, my daughter’s imagination experiences continuous big bang moments. She’s learning new words, context and understands humor, mysteries, tragedies and more. She’s also exploring suspense. The other day, she told me that the police showed up and a boy was taken away from her school. Really?

What kind of situation would have police officers take a child from school? After some clarifications, the story was about a boy who had fallen out of a tree at school and broke his arm. The school called 911 to dispatch the ambulance and the police. The ambulance took the boy and the parents to the hospital. As gripping as the story was, we worked on some serious gaps in the narration which made for better and more accurate storytelling.

Debunking sarcasm will be a lesson to come after facetiousness

Another time, she came home from school and spoke about a field trip they were having the next day and the parents needed to provide supplies and permission form. Why so last minute? After more clarification, she said, “Tricked you, it’s actually next week.” Ah, I didn’t realize she was trying out foreshadowing. As helpful as the trip ‘reminder’ was, we worked on some timing issues in the narration. And I also told her that the gap between keeping people in suspense and telling them what happened afterwards has to be short, otherwise people will misunderstand.

Some weeks go by, I decided to try out sarcasm as a form of storytelling. I made some offhand remark about great timing for someone to become a missing person. She laughed and said that sometimes, she wished one of her schoolmates was a missing person. I told her that that was an awesome example of sarcasm!

Then she said she would disappear and go to her mom’s. She quietly tip-toed away and went outside and close the backdoor. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to call her back in, but a few moments later, she tip-toed back to my side with a smirk. I then broke the silence and said, “Well, hello, I thought you were at your mom’s! What are you doing here?” She burst into tears. Oh boy, did I feel very badly. She thought I wanted her to leave. Storytelling can be emotional and sometimes, words do hurt. For now, we’ll postpone working on advanced literary concepts. Debunking sarcasm will be a lesson to come after facetiousness.