Last night we went out to dinner. As we were driving home, my husband and I were discussing remodelin our bathroom and I was teasing him about how his not handy with tools. Forgetting the kids in the back seat, we started making sexual references about “handy” and “tools.” My six-year old son pipes up from the back giggling, “You’re talking about Daddy’s penis.”
He knows much more than I ever thought…
And She Breathes... 
As you know from reading my blog, my granddaughter has two mommies: her birth mother (my daughter’s partner), known as “Mommy,” and my daughter, whom she calls “Mama.”
My granddaughter was conceived from a test tube with sperm donated by a fellow alumnus of Oberlin College. She knows her father who lives in Chicago but who visits from time. He’s like an uncle to her. She calls him by his first name.
I lightly pestered my daughter and her partner to decide how to introduce her father to her as her father…I wasn’t sure that “This is my ‘sperm donor’ was the best way for her to introduce him to a show and tell session at kindergarten.
Before she was four, she figured it out. “Is [dad] my dad?” she asked. It’s like sex education for little kids…it’s not yet anything to have complex about yet and she isn’t curious about the details yet.
However, when she’s six, instead of worrying about Random Granddaughter picking up joking references to tools as referring to a father’s penis (as your son did), my daughter and her partner better be careful about joking references to test tubes.
I read an article once in the New York Times Magazine about a young adult with two moms. The young woman felt an obligation as a teenager to experiment with relationships with other women, but by the time she was in her twenties she had decided that she was heterosexual and was comfortable with that identity. I wouldn’t be surprised if my granddaughter goes through similar questions and testing of her sexual identity as she grows up. As I am 64 now, I doubt that I will still be around to observe her brave new world future.
Nicole, that’s hilarious. Kids are so … wonderfully inappropriate. 🙂
Modesty, as I was writing this I actually thought of Random Granddaughter, knowing about her moms. My first thought was that this would probably have been slightly foreign to her, but then I imagined her having a conversation with my son. I think everyone would become quite enlightened listening to that!
David, my children seem to be more inappropriate than most. I thought I was doing a good thing in refering to our body parts by their proper names. My daughter, in the dressing room of a small store (which was positioned in the middle of the store) announced, “When I get bigger, I are going to have bigger breasts than you, Mommy.” And in the next breath she announced, “And when I are big, I will have hair on my vagina (she pronounces it beegina) too.” I immediately finished dressing and left the dressing room only to find several clerks breathless and in tears from laughter. I haven’t brought myself to return to the store.
Oh, I think all kids do that sort of thing, once they have an idea of what’s what. I did, when I was little, and as we all know, I was a paragon of proper behavior. My indiscretion involved solemnly explaining the mechanics of reproduction to anyone who would listen to me, after my mother showed me a book about how babies are made. I must have been four or five, I guess … the book was actually designed for children of that age, and didn’t use anatomically correct language, but I put two and two together quickly enough, unfortunately.