What Do You Know That I Don’t?
Lately, my daughter has been asking a lot of questions.
“Why are California oaks protected?”
“Why do some days have no clouds while others are filled with them?”
“Why do certain trees grow faster than others?”
Most of the time, I tell her the truth: “I don’t know.”
“But why don’t you know?” she’ll ask—not accusatory, just curious.
“Because I’m only human,” I say. “I don’t want to make things up just to have an answer. But we can look it up when we get home.”
Sometimes she nods. Other times, she keeps pressing—but why this, but why that—until her questions give way to distraction.
These are the exact kinds of questions that fascinated me as a child. Biology, geography, the natural world—these were my domains of wonder. I was endlessly curious. I wanted to understand how things worked, why they existed, what made them unique.
But when she asks those same questions now, I notice how rarely I follow the thread.
It’s not that I’ve lost interest. It’s that somewhere between then and now, I lost the habit of pursuit.
And I wonder … When did I stop wanting to know? Who suggested—explicitly or otherwise—that I didn’t need to know?
Growing up, my curiosity met walls unless it served a purpose. My mother, a bank manager, could explain financial systems with patience and precision, but had little time for questions about why leaves changed color or how birds navigated migration routes.
“Go look in the encyclopedia,” she’d say, attention already elsewhere. “I don’t have time for this right now.”
If it wasn’t practical, it wasn’t worth knowing. If a question didn’t serve an immediate purpose—improving grades, preparing for a career—it wasn’t a valid question.
I swore I’d do better with my own child. And sometimes I do. But too often, life intervenes—dinner needs cooking, emails demand responses, laundry piles up. The day moves on. The question dissolves into the background noise of routines and responsibilities.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter. That she has access to both of us: her father, the engineer, who explains currency conversion rates and why planes don’t fall from the sky. Me, who helps her navigate friendships and find joy in movement rather than competition.
But what else is she absorbing? That not all knowledge is equal? That even in a home where we talk about fairness, some things are simply not ours to know?
The lines aren’t always as fixed as they seem.
Just yesterday, my husband was playing a word game on his phone.
“Do you know what leather pants are called?” he asked.
“Chaps,” I answered without hesitation.
“Oh,” he said. “I just call them leather pants.”
It was a small moment, but it struck me—that I knew something instinctively he didn’t.
How often do I assume certain knowledge isn’t meant for me? And how often do others assume the same about me?
When my daughter was a little over five we were hiking with a close friend and her son. She grew up in Mendocino, learning from her father which berries were edible, which roots were medicinal, which plants to avoid. So, when she plucked a leaf from a plant growing wild along the path and handed it to my daughter with a “Try this one,” my heart shouldn’t have raced. But it did.
My daughter has outgrown all her identified allergies, but years of emergency room visits had left their imprint. I still carried an EpiPen in my backpack. Still braced myself when she tried something new. Still played out worst-case scenarios before she’d even swallowed.
Yet my friend knew this. She had been on this journey with us from the beginning, had learned how to use the EpiPen herself, had memorized which foods had once sent us rushing to the hospital. My daughter chewed the leaf, trusting that my friend knew.
I hesitated. I watched. My mind started calculating. How far were we from the car? How fast could I get help? There was no cell signal—what would I do if something went wrong?
She was fine.
But I wasn’t.
My friend carries that knowledge of the wilderness in her body, as natural to her as knowing how to swim. I didn’t grow up with it.
My friend isn’t always right, but in this, she was absolutely sure.
And I thought, what would it be like to move through the world with that kind of certainty?
To not just recognize, but to trust in my own knowing?
For days afterward, I kept circling back to that moment. The way she knew, and I hesitated. The way my daughter trusted, and I calculated risks. Was it just caution? Or had I, over time, stopped trusting myself to know?
This question stayed with me, a gentle tug at the edges of my awareness. A reminder of all the things I see but don’t truly know.
And it stirred memories of other moments when I wasn’t the keeper of knowledge. Like that night last January on a moonlit beach in Jamaica, when a streak of light cut across the sky. My daughter—her feet the same size as mine—casually corrected my “Look there’s a shooting star!” with “It’s an asteroid, Mama.”
I’d dismissed her with the confidence of someone who had aced every exam she’d ever taken, only to discover later, alone on our balcony with my tea and Google search results, that the boundaries between asteroids, meteors, and comets were more fluid than I’d remembered. That these weren’t separate things, but shifting states of being. More important, that she was right.
The next morning, I’d admitted my mistake over mango slices. She’d accepted my correction without surprise, mentioning casually she’d read it in a library book.
In that moment, I saw myself in my parents—their unwavering certainty when faced with my childhood questions, their reluctance to cede ground or admit not knowing. I saw the quiet transfer of authority happening between my daughter and me … knowledge passing between generations like a current, reversing its direction when I wasn’t looking.
A shooting star. A fracture in certainty. Infallibility rejected.
That memory lingered, quietly challenging my assumptions about who holds knowledge and how we share it. It made me wonder what else I might be missing—what other familiar things I’d never truly seen.
This past week, I did something that was uncharacteristic. I took a picture of the plant that’s been growing outside our bay window for fourteen years.
Fourteen years of looking at it daily—through breakfasts and evening teas.
Fourteen years without knowing its name.
I did a Google image search. It took seconds to learn what had been right in front of me all along: a dwarf umbrella tree.
And suddenly, it was no longer just a plant. It was a thing with lineage, a thing that belongs, a thing that has a place in the world—not just a presence in mine.
And now, I see it differently. I understand why it’s called what it’s called. Its leaves extend outward like an umbrella flipped upside down in the wind, not shedding rain but holding it, collecting what falls instead of repelling it. The shape reminds me of a cupped human hand, fingers fanned open, catching whatever the sky offers.
Maybe the point isn’t to know everything—but to hold the question, the way those leaves hold rain. Gently, openly, without rushing to drain it away.
The moment of recognition was small but surprisingly satisfying, like finally being introduced to someone I’d been nodding hello to for years.
And I realize, maybe knowing is about the willingness to return, again and again, to the edges of what we don’t know—and to bring our children with us, not as guides who already have the map, but as fellow explorers still learning the terrain.
This morning, when my daughter asked why the fire hydrants are colored differently in different cities, I didn’t just say “I don’t know.”
I said, “I don’t know, but let’s find out together.”
And we did.
