I thought raising a penis person would be easy. I mean seriously, what’s there to know? Yes, there’s that whole spontaneous erection thing and wet dreams, but I didn’t think it would be much more than that. Now men, before you get your boxers in a bunch, I want to start off by saying women are complicated messes. We are like a magnetic compass, without the magnet. We tend to spin in circles, talking ourselves into a tizzy and crying because little Johnny killed a spider. With that being said, men…are simple. You grunt. You puff up your chests when another man looks at your woman. Do you even lift, bro? You compare penis sizes in the locker room. Girls do this as well, but with their boobs. It’s all so simple, or so I thought. What I didn’t know, is just how fascinated males, as a whole, are with their penises. Not to mention how literally they take the saying, “Reach out and touch someone (or something).”

As I’ve learned in my eight and a half years of raising a penis person, nothing about the penis is normal. Flash forward past the days of failed attempts with pee pee tepees, and watching my infant son pee in his own mouth and my eye at the same time. Past the point where I could trust my little guy to run around the house completely naked without the fear of him peeing in the cat dish. This is where I first started to notice just how fascinated with the penis these people are. There I was, a young mother of a two year old boy,sitting on the couch in the early morning hours feeling like death warmed over, and probably looking ten times worse. I watched as my son, completely oblivious to the fact it wasn’t even 5 am yet, joyfully frolicking about in the living room. I had since given up on drinking one cup of coffee at a time, and wandered into the kitchen to find a straw to stick in the pot. When I came back into the living room, coffee pot and straw in hand, I noticed my son doing push-ups in front of the tv. Baffled and amused, not to mention completely caught off guard, I couldn’t figure out why my toddler would be doing push-ups before the sun even came up. Of course I had also been trying figure out why his little mind thought it ok to be up for the day at 4 am for two years prior to this sudden oddity in behavior. Carry on, dear boy. Finish your push-ups and let’s have some breakfast. Then it hit me, he wasn’t doing push-ups. Oh, no! He was cock swabbing my carpet!!! I can only imagine this was all brought on by a quick tumble to the floor while I was in the kitchen, thus resulting in an unexpected “feel” of said carpet.

I have a vagina. I don’t “feel” anything with it. At least not randomly. It stays tucked away where it belongs. Away from random objects. Away from the elements. Away from, well, carpet. As my son continues to cock swab the perimeter of the living room,I can do nothing more than watch in disbelief. Perhaps this is why people call the penis a “third limb”. Either way, it’s gross and it’s weird.

Flash forward, yet again. Past the moment where little boys discover that nut shots are funny, as long as the shot isn’t on them. Past where they start pitching little tents in the morning, and you question why you have yet to buy them their own alarm clock. Let’s flip to last week. My son loves taking showers. The only argument we come across in the bathing aspect is what time of day to do it. He prefers night because it doesn’t waste his time in the morning. I prefer morning because it actually forces him to haul his carcass out of bed. Because I’m awesome and always win last Wednesday my son agreed to shower in the morning. Win! This is where I should add how he likes his showers so hot, I am amazed his skin doesn’t slough off while in there. As you all know, extremely hot water creates a LOT of steam. My bathroom often ends up resembling the Amazon Rain Forest in summer. It’s any wonder my son can safely climb out of the shower when finished, seeing as how one can barely see the edge of the tub through the steam.

I’m used to my son taking long showers. He likes to stay in to the point where the water starts to turn cold, and he knows he can’t go on any longer without the fear of sudden hypothermia. In all honesty, if I wasn’t the one paying the bill, I would probably do the same thing. However, this past Wednesday, something was off. Yes, his shower used all the hot water in the town, but for some reason he wasn’t coming out of the bathroom. I thought maybe I had a bad mom moment, and missed the sound of a dangerous fall, or perhaps the steam had swallowed him whole. So, yes, I had a slight moment of panic. I ran upstairs, threw open the door…..right into my son’s face! “Theo!” I said, “what are you doing?”

“Mommy! Nothing!” He then quickly wrapped himself back up in his over sized towel, and scurried out of the bathroom, throwing the door the rest of the way open. As soon as he was out of sight, I peeked around the back of the door to where he had been standing, naked. As I looked at the full length mirror, covered in condensation, I could see little marks all covering the area about where my son’s waist would be. Upon closer inspection I could see that the little marks were actually little penises. My dear sweet boy had been standing naked in the nice warm bathroom pressing his little penis against the mirror, so he could feel the coolness of the reflective surface and then get a chuckle out of the little shapes that resulted.

It is clear to me now that the need to stick penises places and feel things on it starts at a very early age. I can only imagine what else in my house has been cock swabbed and stamped. God help me when he figures out what masturbation is, and locks himself into his bedroom for hours. Boys are gross, boys are weird, and I am officially baffled by this thing called a penis.