Too Cool for School
I'm proud of the fact that my children grew up knowing the correct words for their reproductive organs and genitalia and how they worked. When I was growing up, parents didn't really talk about those things other than that you were supposed to stay a virgin until marriage and you could get venereal diseases from toilet seats so you better never sit in public restrooms.
I was one of the lucky ones. Thanks to a heavy dose of painkillers that dulled her inhibitions along with her back pain, my mom shared much more information than what might be deemed appropriate for a fourth grade girl growing up in the Midwest in 1968. Although some of the details made me a little uncomfortable, it didn't stop me from goading her with questions. By the time she fell asleep with drool puddling on her pillow, I felt sufficiently informed, despite the fact that she'd left out substantial bits pertaining to anatomy.
Armed with a load of fascinating new information, I slipped a juicy tidbit into conversation with my two best friends on the playground the following day.
"A man's thing grows really big and then he sticks it in a lady's butt and pees," I said as my friend, Wendy, drew a hopscotch pattern on a patch of cement behind the school.
Lili and Wendy looked at each other then back at me. "Uh uh!" they said in unison, which being twins, was not all that uncommon.
"Uh-huh!" I insisted. "My mom said so."
Wendy stomped her foot and planted her hands on her hips. "Our dad would not do that to our mom," she spat from between blinding braces..
"Go ahead and ask her. My mom wouldn't lie. She's a preacher's wife." I said it as if I'd gotten the information from the next best thing to God, which at the time, I believed was true.
Lili made the cuckoo sign with her index finger, drawing circles in the air around her ear and Wendy nodded.
"Fine," I said, and tossed my stone on the fourth square of our chalked diagram. I hopped across the pavement, scooped up my rock, and hopped back just as the bell rang. "You're just not mature enough to understand."
The next day the twins reported back, saying I'd gotten it all wrong. "The man puts it in the woman's bagina, not her butt," Wendy insisted, "and only because he has to in order to fertilize the baby."
Lili nodded. "Plus they do it in the dark under the covers so they don't have to look at each other."
And so it was that we made peace with the unthinkable, curiosity deepening as we defended our misguided theories. Unbeknownst to her, my mom had started an urban myth and we were happy to embellish the story as it passed from my lips to the twins to their mother's and back to other children, who bastardized it with their own variations. According to Susie Buttleman, for example, if a boy peed in the garden, the seeds would grow into cabbage leaves under which the stork would later hide the baby.
It was another couple years before I learned where my bagina actually was and that I didn't pee out of it. By the time I became a mother, I'd long before determined to raise my children with honest and open communication. Although I meant well, occasionally I crossed the delicate line between being a cool mom and being weird. Like the time I put a vibrator in my teenage daughter's Christmas stockings, thinking that if they learned to pleasure themselves, it'd buffer their need to explore sex with partners.
As is often the case with non-twins, most children have very different personalities.
My shy and quiet sixteen year-old daughter, A, was mortified by my act of sexual openness. "Mom!" she cried out upon emptying her stocking.
"What? I thought you'd like it."
She meant to throw the rounded pink tootsie roll at me but her fourteen year-old drama-queen sister, M, intercepted. "I'll take yours if you don't want it."
It occurred to me much later that knowing M's hedonistic tendencies, I should have stocked up on batteries.
Dealing with my daughters' ripening sexuality was challenging, but not as difficult as being the single parent of a sixteen year old precocious son as he approaches manhood. I could relate to my girls because I have the same equipment and went through a lot of the same things. J and I have a very open and honest relationship, but it's much more awkward.
However, I continue to do my best to be hip, so when he mentioned that he and his buddies were "experimenting" with sex, I offered to give him a box of condoms. Knowing his propensity for physical comedy, I conditioned my offer.
"I'm not giving you them just so you can blow them up or fill them with water."
He looked at me, eyebrows raised. "Um, okay. So what you're saying is that if you give me condoms I better get out there and fuck someone, damn it!"
"No! I mean, I just don't want you to catch something or get somebody pregnant, or..."
"Mom?"
"What?"
"Do I get a vibrator in my stocking?"
"Knock it off."
"Flavored astro glide?"
"Stop it."
"Butt plug? Porn video?"
"Shut up!"
"Alright, alright. I know you were just trying to be cool about things."
"Well, so much for that idea. Just promise me you'll be careful."
"Don't worry. And I appreciate it, but I can get my own condoms" He returned to his x-box game, guttural noises and flashing lights to draw him away from me and into his private world of ninja warriors.
Relieved of the conversation, I recovered a fallen ornament from under the tree and hung it on free branch. It's my favorite, one J made in first grade from a photo glued inside a canning jar lid. As I stared at my bespectacled child, missing his two front teeth, a gush of maternal sentimentality flooded my veins. I walked behind the sofa and hugged J around the neck. He patted my hand for an indulgent millisecond before latching back onto the game control.
As I headed for the kitchen to start dinner, he spoke.
"Mom?"
I should have kept walking, pretended I didn't hear, but like any mother perched on the edge of a near-empty nest, I hesitated, hoping for a rare morsel of tenderness in the days before he takes the Big Flight.
"Yes?"
"I suppose a blow-up doll is out of the question."
Use her brand new Cuisinart stainless steel "everything pan" on high heat,
permanently discoloring the finish
