“Pheobe, did you know you have a hole in your butt?”
“Yeah, duh. Everyone has a hole in their butt, even cats.”
“But did you know that’s where your butt penis is?”
“Um…I don’t have a butt penis.”
“I’m totally joking, it’s where your poop comes out.”
I have nothing else I can add to this except: raising boys.
I’d like to have a little discussion about my vagina. No, you perverts, not that kind of discussion. She doesn’t do parlor tricks like shooting ping pong balls across the room or lip sink to popular tunes from the 80’s, so don’t get yourselves too worked up from the excitement. My vagina and I have had a long standing love hate relationship. I should re-word that, we have a long standing hate relationship. I hate her, she hates me. Every once in a while we get along, but it’s more like how a prison inmate gets along with their lawyer during visiting hours. We’re there for one reason, and one reason alone. It’s not a pretty relationship, but we live with it, and it works.
I’ll start off by saying, she’s dramatic. Always getting herself twisted about one ting or another. Her period, UTI’s, baby fever, new penises…you know, the usual. She tenses up, swears at me, and all but packs up to leave. It’s kind of her thing, I let her have her moment, and then we carry on with our day. Ops normal, move along, nothing to see here. We go through this, day in and day out. It’s a constant struggle, but we manage. I have noticed, however, that in her old age she is a bit more prone to suggestion. I see a baby, she swells up and starts ovulating. I mention UTI, and she won’t let me go near a bathroom for hours. New penis? Forget about it. She shuts the steal doors, and swallows the key. There is no way a new penis is ever visiting again. Believe it or not, I’m usually ok with all these little quirks of hers. It is what it is, and I can manage.
Her newest thing because new is awesome is really what’s bothering me. A good friend of mine always gets her period the week before me. Always. She finishes, three days later I start. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have a friendly heads up as to when the demons are coming to eat your uterus. What I don’t like is when her vagina, who is obviously a bitch, decides to start her period a whole week early. Yes, a whole week. I keep track. My vagina heard this on Sunday, and was cramping up like she was ready to die by Monday night. I sat there on my couch, hunched over, trying to sweet talk her away from the dark side. By 1 a.m. the cramps were waking me up, and my back was hurting. I was convinced my period would be starting with the sunrise. Alas, I woke up the next morning to nothing, nothing but mild cramps. By the time I left for work, I had finally talked her off the ledge. The day was then littered with mini menstrual moments, of which I assume, will continue for another week until the actual day arrives. Oh joy is me. Oh joy to my vagina, as she teeters on the ledge taunting the uterus eating demons.
As I said before, I’d like to have a little discussion about my vagina. I hate her, she hates me.
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.
I don’t know about other people’s kids, but mine are always chatty on the car ride to school every morning. By chatty I mean they don’t shut up from the moment I start the car to the moment I push them out the door as we slowly drive by their schools. There are mornings when I’m pretty sure they don’t even come up for air, and they become endless run on sentences. No punctuation. No structure. Just the longest word in the world. Needless to say, I often end up tuning them out. They could be talking about the affects global warming has on penguin habitats, and I would have no idea. Just me being blissfully numb to the run on sentences in the backseat.
As most mothers will tell you, we tend to be “ok” with all the noise kids make, even if it involves screaming. We shrug off the thumps and bumps, and we only listen a tiny bit after a scream to make sure no serious injury has occurred. The part that actually gets us to listen is silence. The minute it’s silent we start to worry. As much as I would enjoy a silent car ride in the morning, I’d rather all the jibber jabber than a brief spurt of silence. That spurt of silence means only one thing in my car, someone has done something inappropriate. Due to my keen listening skills ability to tune my children out, I have no idea what was said prior to this silence the other day. All I know is nothing audible was said followed by, “Pheobe, that’s not what I said. I said BEAN stock.”
Honestly, what on earth could a five year old get the word “bean” confused with? Why the whisper? Wait…another whisper followed by another “Pheobe! That’s NOT what I said! I said BEAN stock!” Spleen. Spleen was the only word I could think of that would drive my son through the roof. Duh! After stopping the world from ending the argument in the back seat, it was time to get to the root of the problem. The silence.
Me: What word did you think your brother said?
Pheobe: …..
Me: He said BEAN stock.
Pheobe: …..
Me: …..
Pheobe: *looks at Theo*
Me: …..
Pheobe: *giggle*
Me: PHEOBE!
Pheobe: *whispers* penis
So there you have it. She thought he said “PENIS stock” not “BEAN stock”. Suddenly images of Jack burying seeds in the ground in his back yard, only to wake up to a giant dildo that reaches the sky jutting up from where the seeds once were, go flying through my head. Jack climbs the giant dildo into the clouds, and comes upon a giant vagina with an appetite for destruction and doom! He searches for the golden egg as most men do only to find it hidden in the most obvious spot. Trust me men, it’s very simple to find. He grabs the egg, and slides back down the dildo, takes out his ax and goes all Lorena Bobbitt on it. It falls to the ground with a mighty thud as Jack rejoices in FINALLY finding the golden egg. <<<Obviously NOT the same image my five year old daughter had in her head, thankfully.
Mommy Undressed 