With each passing day, conversations with my children grow more mature. At ten, ten, twelve and thirteen years of age, we can now chat about grown up stuff, like mortgages, car payments, and periods. Yet, at the same time, conversations can take a sharp left turn toward more juvenile themes at the drop of a hat. Like being caught in a tug-of-war between adolescence and childhood, my kids are currently armed with just enough knowledge to be dangerously funny when overheard discussing things like tampons, and downright hilarious when they purposely include me in their pre-pubescent chat-chit.
They’re curious, but they don’t want to ask. When they do ask, they fidget and squirm and smile, as if I’m pulling out life-sized Mr. and Mrs. Puberty blow-up dolls. To be fair, I am the mom who drew pictures for my daughters when we had the birds and bees talk about four years ago. Here’s an excerpt from the official transcript:
“Hang on. Why are there three holes? What’s that one?”
End of excerpt.
The best part about my kids getting to the age where we not only have serious, forthright conversations about bodily functions is that we can purposely joke about them.
After all, who can resist a good boner joke now and then? Not me, and apparently, not my 13-year old son. In the parking lot of the grocery store the other day, a man waiting outside the store had some interesting looking trousers on…and by the looks of things, he was happy to see whatever it was he was staring at off in the distance. Because I’m losing my ability to filter my verbal mutterings by the day, I made the first move.
“Oh my god!” I blurted out, glancing at the guy as we approached and cruised by slowly (parking lot, remember?) My son shot a look at me and then switched his glance to the direction I was looking. Just in case you’re wondering, this happened instantaneously: my look, my gasp, my son’s look, and my son’s comment:
“Holy crap! You could hang a coat hanger on that!”
There it was – a boner joke, and my beautiful, young, innocent boy said it. Not only that, it was funny and made me laugh.
Then, there are the girls.
Those little women have a way of getting information out of me, especially the youngest two.
Walking in through the garage door recently, I had just started to kick my shoes into the appropriate shoe box, and they were on me. One had me around the waist and the other had a fistful of my jacket up at the scruff of my neck. They pressed me up against the couch, and bent me over backward just enough to disarm me of the power of leverage.
“Okay, lady, you better tell us right now what that deuce thing was!”
“What are you guys doing? What is going on??”
“Tell US NOW!! WHAT WAS THE DEUCE THING??”
“What are you two nut bombs talking about?”
“The thing that Robbie said at school today that Jackson was telling you about that his older sister told him about.”
Somehow, I followed that. But, that’s another blog.
“Are you talking about ‘douches’?”
“We don’t know! Are we?!”
“Oh my god. Are you kidding me?!” I was laughing so hard I was helpless. I was also in a stranglehold.
Keep in mind, these girls are ten. I’m not a short woman. They had me bent over the couch in an extremely uncomfortable position. Of all people, I am generally the one who sees sneak attacks from fifty paces. At this point, I would have made any concessions necessary to free myself from the frenzied grip of the ten-year old version of the Spanish Inquisition.
I had to think quickly. Do I really want to tell them this information? As much as I enjoy them asking for information that when disclosed, makes them almost pee their pants and then run away from me, I wasn’t sure they were ready for this. I geared up for my explanation, though to be perfectly honest, I was going to have to wing it, if you know what I mean.
At that moment, my thirteen year old son walked in the room. He wanted to know what was going on.
“Mom’s going to tell us what deuces are RIGHT NOW!”
If they could not even pronounce it, were they old enough to know what it was? Keep in mind, these are the two very same girls who once found a tampon in the glove box of my car and when one asked what it was, the other said, “It’s those things you put up your butt.”
An hour earlier, when my son had told me the “deuces” story, he asked me the same question, but it went like this:
“Mom, what’s a douche bag?”
“Remember the guy who lived next door to us on Oak Street?”
“Yeah.”
“Douche bag.”
“No, Mom, I mean what is it really?”
“Dear god are you kidding me? You are going to regret this.”
“I want to know. Christine Collins said her little brother Robbie was running around her house saying it and so his mom hauled him to the grocery store and showed him what it was and he freaked out.”
“Okay, it’s a slang term for a slime ball, derived from the French word, ‘douche.’”
“Mom! Stop it! What is a douche?!”
That’s when we went behind closed doors. Apparently, that’s also when the ten-year old goon squad started whispering and plotting.
I kept it short and simple because frankly, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
The second I revealed the physical location of the body part associated with douches, thirteen year old boy squirmed, then turned and faced the extremely interesting closet door for a close inspection until I was finished.
“Got it.”
“You asked.”
Back to the mugging.
When the boy entered the room and saw me getting clobbered, I decided to do the mature thing and evade and get this over with. There was no way I was going to contribute to their long list of things to have nightmares about. Plus, they were hurting my shoulder.
“Jackson, the girls want to know what a boner is.” It was the girls who spoke next, in no uncertain terms:
“Oh my god, Mom! Gross!!”
I knew I almost had them, meaning they were on the edge of running away screaming for the sanctity of their bedrooms, putting this hideous, yet hysterical conversation that I was actually highly amused by to an appropriate end.
“Aha! So you know what a boner is??” I snapped, turning the tables on them.
“We’re outta here!”
“Yeah, we’re outta here!”
“I’m glad we had this talk,” I sang cheerily as they sped off like little roadrunners.
This is awesome. So, so awesome.