WORDS

As any responsible parent would, I belong to all of the websites that Samantha frequents (Instagram, Twitter, etc). Additionally, I go the extra mile and actually monitor her posts, research the crap I don’t get, and help her meet her heroes’ (gratuitous pandering on that last one). I’ve seen her use “off color” acronyms, questionable phrasing – that sort of thing, but I’ve sort of stood back to see where it would go. The other day I was reading a few posts and she had definitely crossed the line. Here was the talk I gave to her:

“So, I wanted to talk to you about a couple of your posts. (I showed her the posts, then continued). I have a list of hopes and expectations of you, Samantha. I want you to be strong, intelligent, compassionate, kind, driven and successful. But one other things that I would like you to be is just a little bit classier then I. And that REALLY isn’t that hard. Seriously. And the best way to do that is through your language. There are a lot of things that people will use as a reason to judge you. Language is one of those. Probably the most important. When you use foul language, spoken or written, you give people a reason to see you as “less than”. And I don’t ever want anyone to ever have a reason to view you as less than. Because you are MORE than. I know that I have a foul mouth, so this might seem hypocritical of me to say this, but I don’t ever want to see or hear you say these words again. Maybe when you’re 18. I never spoke the way I do now when I was your age. I was in my 20’s before I ever said a foul word in front of my parents. So if you want to play with these words around your friends, I can’t do anything about that. I would just hope that you would choose to not use these words. Do you know what Dan’s mom always used to say to him if she heard him swear? She would say “Are you too dumb to think of a better word?” I know you are more than capable of thinking of better words. And speaking of, do you even know what this word means (pointing to one of her posts)?” “Ugh, no. I just saw it on one of ‘so-n-so’s posts’.” “I’ll give you a choice. I can either explain to you what that word means, or you can take my word that you should never, ever use that word again.” Thank God I didn’t have to explain. Because I would have.

I’ve been asked by many people “what was the word she didn’t know?” and “What would have told her”.  Before I go into the ‘what-if’s’ of this story, allow me to tell you another tale.  One fraught with similar obstacles and discomfort.  A tale that I have not told to many.  You may want to sit down for this.

I separated from my husband in December 2012.  I bought a house in a split second, 4 doors down from his, and packed in a flurry over one weekend.  I had a device of a sensitive nature that I packed in a specific box, inside another specific box to make sure it was well hidden, and not forgotten.  Some time passed and I went to unpack this device, and it was not where I remember – vividly – putting it.  This perplexed me, but I had bigger problems in my life, so I just sort of shrugged it off.  It had to be somewhere.  Months later, Samantha and I were at her father’s house, in the laundry room, looking for some of her clothes.  I lifted a pile of clothing off of the washer to sort through it and “BONK!” onto the floor my, my device of a sensitive nature, did fall.  Right there.  On the floor between us.  My vibrator.

Several thoughts of panic and confusion ran through my head.  First and foremost was “what the HELL is that doing in his laundry room?” That thought, while screaming as loud as an air-horn in the front of my brain, was momentarily over ridden by the fact that my 9yr old daughter was quizzically staring at the object on the floor.  Time stopped as I swooped in, scooped it up and threw it into one of the cabinets.  “What was that?” Sam asked me.  She would ask me this question at least 10 times before we got home.  My list of answers sounded something like these:  “Nothing.  Forget about it.  Just a thing.  It’s nothing, really.  Don’t ask me again.”-My mind still reeling about WTF was it doing there.

When we got home, she still kept asking me what it was.  I sat her down at the kitchen table and this was how it went.

“Do you really want to know what that was:”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m telling you right now, if I tell you what that was, you are going to wish that you didn’t ask me.”

“Yes.  I want to know.”

“Right.  Ok.  So- you know what sex is, right?

“Yes.”

“And you that when two people love each other they have sex to have a baby.  Well, having sex is a very pleasurable experience in a lot of ways.  Physically, being one of them.  Sometimes, when a woman doesn’t have a man around to have that physical relationship with, she might want to still experience the pleasure that comes with sex.  That device is called a vibrator and it allows a woman to have sex, without a man.”

“.”

“Do you understand?”

Then I went on for way to long of a debrief about “if you have any questions…you can always talk to me about anything…I’m here for you…This doesn’t get you out of emptying the dishwasher…” etc.

Finally I asked her the question that I should have opened with.  “What did you think it was?”

“I just thought it was a giant worm toy thing.”

My interviewing skills just took a hit. 

As you might have guessed, after this conversation she knows I will tell her pretty much anything, and when given the choice during this most recent incident, she decided that her maturity level just couldn’t handle “Mom” right now.

To loop back around, the word that she used was “Jizz”.  Just typing it make me feel like I should be sitting in a back ally rolling cigarettes from other peoples discarded cigarettes.  One of her favorite YouTuber’s used the word in a video saying he was going to “Jizz on your dog”.  She replied saying “Don’t jizz on my dog!”  While I agree with the request, I feel this exchange was not….age appropriate. 

How, then, would I attempt to define this colorful word to an 11 year old?  As honestly and clinically as possible.  It would sound something like this:

You know about sex, right? (sound familiar?). You know that sex is the act that creates babies.  The process involves the man supplying sperm that is deposited into the female, and that sperm travels inside the woman’s body in search of an egg to fertilize so that a baby can be made.  Sperm leaves the man’s body through the penis in a fluid called semen, during a process called ejaculation.  There are many slang terms for these fluids and processes.  One of the terms for the fluid is “Jizz”.  Any questions?”

This does not, of course, include the white board presentation that would accompany the explanation, that I would surly supply.

This is not the hard part of parenting for me.  I can define a word, explain a concept, debate, clarify, and teach.  The difficult part for me is the everyday.  Clean clothes, a dining room table that doesn’t look like a bulimic filing cabinet rests nearby, getting the boy off the Xbox. Homework.  Getting the boy to eat anything besides peanut butter and mac & cheese. These are my challenges.  But also, I don’t like not knowing if any of this stuff is getting thru to them.  Samantha especially.  She is so much me, but SO much her father.  Her ability to not talk about her feelings and give you the brick wall stare may rival even her fathers.   And he held stuff back for 15years.  It would be impressive if I hadn’t been the one in the dark.  But that’s another story, for another time.

As for my adventures in explanation with Samantha, I will leave you with one last story that brings our stories full circle.

It was somewhere around a year and a half after the vibrator incident.  I had replaced the abandoned unit from Chris’s laundry room to a newer model, available only in hot pink.  It resided in my nightstand drawer.  One day, on a cleaning frenzy, I cleaned out the drawer, dumping everything onto the floor.  I had not finished returning all the items to their home before getting distracted with other things.  Later, I came down to my bedroom where Samantha was jumping on the bed.  She stopped, looked at the floor and said “Mom.  What is that?”  “What is what?”  “What is THAT?” pointing a laser sharp finger and stare at the hot pink ‘worm looking thingy’ on the floor.  I replied, as I scooped it up and threw it in the drawer in record breaking time, that it was something that we weren’t going to talk about right now.  This angered her.  The wall came down and it, along with her, stormed upstairs to her room.

Sometime later, I approached her door and could hear her crying.  I entered and found her, on her bed, back to the wall, knees up, head down – sobbing.  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, she wouldn’t answer me.  But I knew what was wrong, I just didn’t want to accept it.  She wouldn’t answer me with words and would not look at me.  I asked her a series of yes or no questions, to which she would nod yes or no in reply.  After a solid 20 minutes of inquisition, this is the information that I gathered:

-She knew it was a vibrator.

-She knows what it’s for.

-She thinks it’s OK for women to feel good.

-She thinks it’s OK to use one to feel good.

-It’s ok for a woman to have one.

However, It’s not OK for ME to have one.

And there you have it.  I’m not a woman.  I’m a mom.  There my little girl sat crying because of some failure of mine.  But what failure?  I didn’t know she would be in my room, I didn’t leave it out on purpose, and I thinks it’s perfectly fine for me to have one.  So what did I do to cause this?  My sin? Just being me.  Of all the times I will punish her and she will cry or be mad or even ‘hate’ me, for justice being served - making her cry for just being me has got to suck the most.  I am powerless.  It’s as if she was crying because my favorite color is silver.  I’ve got nowhere to go with that information.  I can’t solve it or make it right.  This lesson, the lesson of the full weight and impossibility of parenting – brought to me by, a dildo.