Ferbertizing My Eggs

This morning Mouse and Chipmunk wanted to talk about their parts.  Yeah, those parts.  Specifically, I walked in on them sitting on Mouse’s loft bed, comparing their girly bits.  When I opened the door to get them ready for the morning, Chipmunk cheerfully announced, “Look, Mommy, we looking at our pee-pee places!  Mina has big one!”  Best thing ever to hear first thing in the morning.  

Last year, I wrote about a talk between me and Mouse on a very related topic.  It seems appropriate to share it now, despite that it is an old discussion.  And really, all awkward sex talk is timeless.

Dear Mouse,

Today’s letter? It is about the birds and the bees. Yes, Mouse, you are only 3.5 years old, but we have officially had our first, ahem, discussion. You see, since you’re only 3.5 years old, you have no sense of privacy. Therefore, you feel it is very normal to walk in on your mom while she’s in the bathroom. Recently, you did this and stumbled upon mom, err, dealing with her time of the month. After some initial worry that I’d had some kind of enormous ouchy, the “why” questions started…

Mouse: “Why do you bleed, Mommy?”
Mommy: “Because that happens to women, usually once a month.”
Mouse: “Why?”
(Eternity passes in five seconds…)
Me: “Um, well, you make an egg every month, and if it doesn’t get fertilized, then you have your period, and that is when you bleed.”
(Now, yes, I understand that you had no hope of understanding what I just said, but a) I think it’s silly to make up weird stuff to get out of telling your kids the truth and b) I honestly couldn’t think of anything else to say.)
Mouse: “You have an egg in your woodah??? Like the chickens?? What color is it?”
Me: “No, no, not the same. It is really itty bitty, with no shell.”
Mouse: “Oh, well why did you not ferbertize it?”
Me: “You usually need someone else for that. Usually a Daddy.”
Mouse: “Why did Daddy not ferbertize it? Was he busy at work?”

This conversation went on for a few more minutes until we started getting into some real existential questions about why people have babies and can you scramble Mommy’s eggs for breakfast. Well, Mouse, at this point I realized the error of my ways and I changed the subject to what kind of snack we were going to have that morning.  So there you have it. I guess I’ve always been of the mind that kids should just know the mechanics of sex if they asked, but once I actually started explaining it, I did feel a few pangs of uncertainty. Would you go and talk about egg ferbertizing at the playground and make the other mommies think I was some kind of weird misfit? Would you start wondering about ferbertizing your own eggs? I felt the need to explain that sometimes two mommies or two daddies start this process as well, but the whole thing got so out of hand so quickly.

I also realized that the real conversation about sex when you’re in your teens is pretty darn scary. Be that as it may, don’t think that your mother was too puritanical and to ever discuss the birds and the bees. To the contrary, I was perhaps willing to discuss it all too early, and got scared away. This letter is my proof that I tried though. My heart was in the right place, you just surprised me a little too early, kiddo.

Love,
Mom

So there it is.  A year later, it is clear to me that this stuff never goes away.  Crap.