At bedtime recently, 5-year-old Laurel was having trouble settling towards sleep, not unsurprising given that it’s still light out at her bedtime. Looking for a change of pace that might help her feel sleepy, I started to sing the Shema, as my husband and I often do during her bedtime songs. She listened quietly, laying her head in my lap instead of putting the sheet over her head and declaring she had become a bouncing tent, as she’d been doing not too many minutes before that. (InterfaithFamily has a great booklet about saying the Shema as a kids’ bedtime ritual. Check it out here.)

When I finished singing the quiet words about God’s onnness, she asked, “Sing me another Jewish song, Mommy,” and I did, choosing Oseh shalom, which is one of my favorite tunes to sing her before sleep.  I love the melody, and the soothing message about peace that it conveys. Sometimes I get a little bit too into the song, my head nestled against her ear, and she tells me, “Sing more quietly, Mommy; you’re too loud!”

As is almost usual, she started talking halfway through the song. “Mommy? Mommy?”

“… shalom aleinu…” I continue, pausing to say, “be quiet, sweetie, I’m singing!”

Eventually, my voice quieted as the song ended. “What did you want to ask?”

“How do you know Jewish songs, Mommy?”

I chuckled. “I’ve learned them by singing them many times, honey,” I explained, “the same way you learned the songs for your class’s Spring Sing.”

“Oh,” she said. She’d recently memorized “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in Chinese for the Spring Sing, so I thought she might understand my own learning of songs I didn’t grow up with as a similar process.

As usual, though, I wasn’t prepared for her follow-up question: “Do you know any Christian songs, Mommy?”

I deliberated before answering. Previous readers of my blog entries will know that I’m now a Unitarian Universalist, and was raised in a liberal Episcopalian household. In answer, I could have recalled songs I sang decades in the children’s choir at in the church of my childhood, songs like “Here I Am, Lord,” which is about answering God’s call to serve people in the world. But I can just imagine myself getting caught up in theological difficulties as I sing it: who’s doing the sending? Is it Jesus, or God the Father? What if they’re the same? With that level of chatter going on in the back of my mind, it’s easier to choose other songs to sing, like “Puff the Magic Dragon” or “My Favorite Things.”

In the end, I replied, “Christmas songs are Christian,” which garnered an un-illuminated “oh” from Laurel and a serious query as to whether there are other Christian songs.

“Well, there are,” I told her, “but I don’t remember them very well.” Bedtime is probably not the right time to explain that in addition to not remembering them very well, I am not sure I want to sing traditional Christian songs. At bedtime I usually fall back on the kinds of songs my parents sang to me when I wasn’t quite ready to sleep yet: songs from musicals from my mom, and folk songs from the 1960s from my dad. Now I wonder that the melancholy of so many folk songs did not keep me up at night (shouldn’t I have been bothered by “Where Have All The Flowers Gone”?)

Laurel’s innate sense of fairness suggests to her that I ought to sing Christian songs to her to balance the Jewish songs she’s already learning. She knows I am not Jewish and that we therefore have an interfaith home. She wants “not Jewish” to have an “is something” attached to it, and I take her request for “Christian songs” as a request for my background and heritage to be hers, as well. If I am to be true to us as an interfaith family, I also need to be true to the complexities of what my husband and I both bring to our interfaith childrens’ lives.

Next time, when Laurel asks me to sing a “Christian” song, I’ll realize that she’s asking about my background, and I’ll be better prepared to sing a different song – not necessarily a Christian song – but a song to which I can bring as much joy as I bring to Oseh shalom. As she grows older, too, I hope that my repertoire of songs I’ve learned as an adult, especially including the Jewish songs that are so important to Laurel, will continue to expand. Maybe, once again, she’ll ask me to sing “just a little quieter, Mommy, and not right in my ear.”