“You don’t have a penis,” my three-year-old son Jesse says as I step out of the shower.
“No, I don’t. Boys and men have penises. Women and girls have vaginas.”
“What’s a vagina?”
“You know how a woman’s belly gets big when there’s a baby inside? The vagina is a part of the body that allows babies to get from inside their mothers to be born.”
“Oh.”
That was easy.
A few months later we’re having dinner in the sprawling family home of my new boyfriend with his doctor father and homemaker stepmother in a suburb of Manhattan. It’s my first introduction to his family. My father was a machinist and my mother a seamstress, both strict Catholics who think the body is shameful. I grew up in an apartment in a triple-decker, so I’d seen neighborhoods like this one only on TV and in movies. I’m intimidated by their education, architecture, landscaping, and horses grazing in the paddock. Jesse, ever engaging, charms the parents and thankfully the attention is not on me and my thrift store outfit.
An elegant, ornate bowl sits at the center of the table, which Jesse admires from afar. He looks at my boyfriend’s father and asks with a lisp, “What’that bowl made of?”
“China,” the father says.
“You mean how babies are born?”
The father, substantial brows knitted, cocks his head at Jesse and then glares at me expectantly.
At that moment I ask myself, what’s it going to be—squash the kid or tell it like it is?
“No, Jesse, the bowl is hand-made from special clay called porcelain and then painted. That’s called china with a “ch” sound. You’re thinking of “va” vagina with a “vee” sound—that’s how babies are born.”
“Oh.”
An awkward silence descends. The stepmother, staring at her plate, moves her food around with her fork. My boyfriend’s face turns red as he pops his eyes at me stifling a guffaw. The father looks surprised. I’d been self-conscious about my ability to take part intelligently in upper middle class dinner conversation. I never imagined having to go that far out on a limb to stick to my commitment to always answer Jesse’s questions no matter what they were about. The doctor turns his gaze to me, raises his caterpillar eyebrows and bellows, “Good for you! That was a great answer.”
Great answer!