If you ever fancy a lesson in cause and effect, or the insidious evil of cosmic ordering, just try sitting on a bucket swing in a play-park ten minutes’ walk from home, lazily rocking back and forth in the hazy summer sunshine as your kids run and skip and jump from chute to chute, and dare to utter the words ‘Well, this is nice.’ See how quickly one of your grown kids waddles towards you shouting, ‘I need a poo!’
This happened to us last week. The play-park suddenly transformed into the US retreat that preceded the Fall of Saigon; there were screams, children being slung over shoulders, people running in terror and confusion. Operation Frequent Wind indeed. This time, though, it was an evacuation in order to prevent an evacuation.
We intermittently dashed and quick-marched our way back home through a warren of paths and streets. To speed things along my wife and I carried a kid each, but those little suckers are heavy, so we had to keep putting them down on the ground and herding them along like ducks to allow our backs time to recover.
I was in charge of airlifting Jack, 4, our eldest, the kid whose words had precipitated our urgent and perilous journey. I could’ve gotten him home in a fraction of the time, but for obvious reasons I wasn’t terrifically keen on carrying him on my shoulders…
When we were still a few minutes from home, Jack won a crucial battle against his brain and body, and was able to charm the snake back into the basket. This bought us some precious time. He was still tottering along like a penguin, but no longer whining and groaning like a soldier who’d lost his legs to napalm.
‘We still need to hurry, though, Jack,’ said his mum. ‘You don’t want to poo yourself, do you?’
‘No,’ replied Jack, very enthusiastically. ‘But you can poo yourself, mummy, because you’ve got that plastic thing on your butt. It’s just like a nappy.’
Plastic thing on her bu… ah. The penny dropped.
‘No, that’s not a nappy,’ said his mum. ‘That’s for… well, sometimes mummy… bleeds…. out of her bum.’
I could see the cogs turning behind Jack’s eyes, threatening to turn those two viscous blobs into a matching pair of question marks, a slot-machine jackpot where the prize was unending confusion and psychological scarring. ‘Don’t lie to him,’ I said to my wife through one side of my mouth, but loud enough so that everyone could hear it, therefore rendering the whole side-mouth thing completely irrelevant.
There was a moment’s silence as we mulled over a way to be truthful to him without inviting ever more difficult questions. ‘Well,’ said my wife, taking my cue and advancing cautiously, ‘I sometimes bleed through my…well, through the bit at the front.’
‘The hole,’ I chipped in. I quickly remembered we’d settled on ‘vagina’ during a previous discussion on a related topic, so attempted a course correction. ‘Vagina. The vagina hole.’
My wife shook her head at me. I had to redeem myself here.
‘Well,’ I began, ‘you know how ladies can carry babies, but men can’t? It’s because ladies and men have got different bits on the outside and the inside.’
Jack nodded. I shot my wife a searching look that seemed to ask, ‘Have I just committed a transgender hate crime?’
I’d started so I’d finish. ‘Ladies make eggs inside of their bodies, but not every egg turns into a baby. The ladies bodies make an egg once every month, see, just to the lady is always ready to have a baby if she wants to. And if the lady isn’t ready to have a baby, then the body gets rid of the egg, and that’s why the lady bleeds from her… you know. But if she’s ready, she can use the egg to grow a baby.’
Jack nodded thoughtfully. There were more questions bobbing beneath his consciousness like icebergs. ‘How does a lady get the egg ready to make into a baby?’
‘Well, the lady needs an, em, it’s like… it’s like when you started growing inside mummy. Mummy first needed a seed from daddy to make her egg grow into you, into a wee baby.’
Jack nodded again, up and down, very fast: like a shotgun being re-loaded.
Here it comes…the kill shot… CHIK-CHIK…
BOOM!
‘How did your seed get into mummy so it could make the egg grow into a baby?’
[The reckless old man drops down to his knees, and prostrates himself before the universe, rocking backwards and forwards shouting, ‘WHAT HAVE I DONE? OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE??!’]
The way I see it, you’ve got two choices at this point.
Choice 1: go down the whimsical route. Skip along the Yellow Brick Road tipping your hat to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, while flinging out lies like rose petals. What’s that you ask? By what mechanism did my seed reach your mother’s egg? Why, by magic of course, young man! I shoved on a top hat and white gloves, shouted out Abracadabra, tapped your mummy’s tummy ten times with my wand, and then pulled you out by the ears. Don’t like that answer, eh? In that case, I shrunk myself down to the size of an ant, shimmied through your mummy’s belly button into the tummy beyond, drilled my way into the egg you were hiding inside using a tiny corkscrew, spat through the shell with a straw, and then sat on your egg until it hatched, at which point your mummy gave birth to both of us at the same time. Em, what else have I got here? Em… babies are from space? I planted some tomato seeds in a tub of soil and made your mummy eat it? [wipes sweat from brow] We won you in a raffle? BABIES DON’T EXIST I MADE IT ALL UP?
Choice 2: HBO meets X-Hamster. Give a harrowing, biologically- and sexually-accurate blow-by-blow account of the entire process from start to finish: all four, grueling minutes of it. ‘Let me tell you about your conception, Jack. First thing’s first, your mum is a fucking live wire. Jesus, she makes my balls feel like they’re in an earthquake. So, anyway, one minute we’re watching Gogglebox, and the next minute I’m gobbling her box. She’s got one leg dangling over the back of the couch, and the other one kicking out like a Go-Go dancer, I’m certain she’s going to split down the middle, and of course I’ve got a face like a man who’s fallen in a vat of vaseline. I’m brick-hard too; the wee fella can’t wait to go spelunking in that hole – the same one you were going to come out of about nine months later… Jack… Jack? HONEY, THE KID’S BEEN SICK AND FAINTED!!! Poor little fella, he must have a bug or something.’
In the end I opted for a third way. Parental choice isn’t a two-party state. There’s no either/or. You’ve got to think on your feet; riff like a jazz musician. Option three: be both honest and highly obstructive at the same time.
‘There’s more to this, son,’ I told him. ‘Things you’re not ready to know yet, and believe me, there are things you don’t want to know yet. For now, it’s enough to know that mummies make eggs, and daddies can help make those eggs into babies.’
He seemed satisfied with that answer. Either that or he was so busy trying not to shit himself that he no longer cared about the tummies and big bleeding bummies of the world’s mummies. I vow, though, that when the day comes for Jack to know more about the finer points of this subject I will boldly, and without hesitation, immediately, and without delay, tell him to ask his mother.
When we got home – just in the nick of time, I hasten to add – Jack merrily plopped out his poo, leaving his mother and me to poke the turtle’s head of sexual knowledge back up into our guts until we were good and ready to let the stink out.
I guess what I’m saying is: smell ya later.
