When my wife and I learned our second child, Dalton, would be a boy, we were relieved. Not just because Dalton is an unfortunate girl’s name, but because we already had a girl child and always wanted one of each. We like collecting things.
More importantly, having a boy meant we could stop having kids. When Dalton arrived, we closed up the baby making shop. Nicole got her tubes tied and I hung an “out of order” sign up on my own spawning equipment, sending my seed off to a well-deserved retirement. I think they reside in Florida now.
We’ve found having a baby boy is much different from the demands of a baby girl. Dalton’s XY contribution has brought a certain special brand of maleness to our home, namely because he’s taken to grabbing his junk.
A lot.
It’s not like he gently jostles them either. He reaches down, takes a fistful and gives the sac a hearty squeezing like he’s making juice. When bare-assed on the changing table, Dalton takes full advantage of himself. The first time he did it nearly knocked my wife, Nicole, out. “My god, doesn’t that hurt him?!” As a guy, I would think so. I know his testicles haven’t descended, but still. I mean, he throttles his scrotum like it owes him money. Clearly by the look on his face, though, it didn’t hurt.
“No,” I assured her, “he’s in no pain.” Dalton continued to massage and knead his junk while darting his eyes back and forth between mommy and daddy, looking for approval. Nicole’s concern shifted to disdain. “Gross, he’s such a man.” In response, Dalton pinched the tip of his foreskin and yanked it out six inches. He giggled. This seemed to please him a great deal, so he yanked at it again and again like a man starting a lawn mower. Now I had to cover my eyes, all the while sputtering “Totally natural. Can’t hurt a bit.”
When he isn’t practicing self-mutilation on an intimate level, Dalton finds more casual ways to manipulate his equipment.
It is not uncommon for Dalton, running about the house clad in nothing but a diaper, to snatch up a wooden block and start smashing his crotch with it. There is a ceremony to it. His arm chops down with a religious fervor and with every crushing thud he lets loose a “HOO-AH!” for his reverent self-flagellation. Sometimes he’ll catch me watching him and stare me down with the intensity of a zealot. Bringing the block crashing down again, Dalton practically cries, “Begone, Satan! Begone from my testicles!” The surreality of this experience is intensified by the fact Dalton is my spitting image, 30 years removed. We look identical right down to the haircut (yes I have the hairstyle of a toddler) so when he delivers blunt force trauma to his genitals, it’s like he’s doing so for both of us.
For Nicole, it’s not really the yin and yang of self-love and self-negation delivered upon his wiener that freaks her out. No one blames Dalton for his violent acts of exploration; his genitals hang out and are chock full of nerves. Naturally he’d be curious and it’s not like he’s a leather-bound S&M gimp. No, what Dalton does to his penis is not what Nicole is afraid of. It is the penis itself. This is fear I know well.
Parents stress over many things while waiting for their first child to arrive: Will she be healthy? Safe? Ten fingers, 10 toes, all that. In the weeks and months leading up to the birth of our first child, Jillian, one single thought filled me with a constant rumble of panic: Jillian’s forthcoming private parts and their relation to fecal matter.
Oh my god, I thought, what am I going to do if she gets poop in her business?
Girls’ equipment is internal and mysterious, which is to say extremely frightening to a newbie father. The first time I had to reckon with getting the poop out of Jillian’s thing, I thought I would die. I hid in the closet, put a blanket over my head and sang old campfire songs while rocking gently. I asked Nicole if she would just go ahead and take care of that for, well, ever.
But Nicole would not take care of it forever, or even right that moment. She pulled me out of the closet, told me to stop singing Kumbaya and handed me a wipe. Infant Jillian stared up at me wondering what the hell was the hold up. Starting at the edges, I worked the poo as far away from Jillian’s gentle parts for as long as I could. After five minutes, you could eat off the perimeter of Jillian’s butt, but there was still a whole lot of mess around the bull’s eye.
“You’ll have to get that part too,” Nicole told me.
Circling closer and closer to the root of my terror, I eventually confronted my demons and got Jillian clean. My eyes were closed and there was a lot of screaming, from me, but it got done. Nicole rejected my suggestion that we take Jillian to the car wash next time because a power washer affords one the comfort of distance. Just like Dalton’s wood block bashing is for Nicole, poop really wasn’t the issue for me, though it was no bonus. The poop merely provided a gateway to the real trouble—my ignorance and resulting fear of Jillian’s female bits.
Days later the poopy groin issue resurfaced, and again I survived. A month later I was swabbing down Jillian’s diaper area with the speed and efficiency of a NASCAR pit crew. It wasn’t until I fastened the diaper that I realized I no longer feared Jillian’s privates. And all it took for me to overcome my fear of her delicate parts was to encounter them a couple hundred times. Now that area is old hat to me. It’s become just another body part, not unlike her arm or nose. OK, to be fair, it’s not like her nose. We never play the game Got your vagina.
Luckily, Jillian was too young to remember when her private parts made me squeamish, and so she was never ingrained with a fear of them. In fact, she’s rather cavalier in her attitude towards male and female genitalia. The other day Jillian and I stopped at a roadside rest stop. I took her into the men’s room stall to do her business, and when she was done I did mine. As I finished, in the middle of a men’s room crowded with truck drivers and weary travelers, my 3-year-old daughter screamed, “Look at your vagina daddy. My daddy’s got a big vagina!”
Parenting is not for prudes.
You may have an unhealthily Puritanical aversion to your body’s various parts and functions, but children don’t. Children are free and open with their bodies and have no time for your squeamishness. Do you remember when you felt that way about your own body? When you squealed and danced with delight as you streaked naked through the house and yard? Do you recall the simple joy of a cheek-slapping fart? Of course not. shame was introduced to many of us before the ABCs. I know my kids will eventually have to learn to stop groping themselves and yelling about vaginas or they will never hold down a job, but I hope to keep those tough lessons of bodily shame at bay for as long as I can.
That means I’ve had to get over my own hang-ups and become the kind of person I never imagined. The kind of person who smiles peacefully as my child tells a stranger in the grocery check-out line about the really great dump she took earlier. The kind of person who bites his tongue when his daughter runs in circles, slippery and naked from the bath, while pulling her butt checks as far apart as possible and screaming, “I’m Supergirl!” The kind of person who, when his toddler son wants to show daddy how many clothespins he can attach to his pee-pee, gives the boy a thumbs-up and says “Way to go, son.”
—Photo Travis Isaacs/Flickr
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Two things you don’t want to hear a three year old boy holler from the bathroom: “Hey, I peed all over!” and “Something is wrong with the toilet!”
Loved your article! Hilarious and oh so true! We asked our son…”how come you are always grabbing your crotch?” his response: “THAT’S HOW LONG MY ARMS ARE” We died…what do you say to that!?
LOL As a wife to a man who has a (now) 3 year old daughter I laugh. DEFINITELY going to let my husband read this one so that he can see that it’s not something to be feared… Of course when my son was going through potty training, when I first met my current husband…it was all the rage to exclaim, loudly, for all the neighbors to hear that he’d learned to ‘pee like a man’ …standing up that is. But the more than a year it took for our daughter to keep any stitch of clothing on brought him… Read more »
Terrific piece (apparently Dalton’s attitude, as well). Little kid crotches seem completely impervious to pain. I used to cringe when one of our boys would crush his junk, but…okay, I still cringe. It’s freakish.
We have one little girl and three little boys. Like you say, after a couple hundred rounds, cleaning up down there isn’t any different for her than the others. And she has her hands down her pants just as much as they do. Kids are kids.
Awesome article.
It bothers me when people call bits by their wrong names. The external portion of a female’s anatomy is called a Vulva, not a vagina. I hope to god your baby didn’t have poop in her vagina.
Good to know we’re not the only family harboring tiny streakers. Funny post. Nicely done.
Holy. Crap. (no pun intended) Did you write this about me when my daughter was born? Unfortunately, my two little ones were in reverse order, so I had a false sense of confidence when Thing 3 rolled in with all her girl parts. “Oh, I got this…” I said to myself… Not so much. I freaked out like a tweaker on Cops the first time I encountered the “uber-mess”. I literally screamed. and cried. I may have made a mess in my own pants, it’s still kinda hazy. Great post that truly captures the differences in babies of the same… Read more »
Quite the belly laugh from this one: I had the same experience when my daughter came into this world. While I never wore latex gloves and a swim mask, it took me some time to come to grips with, so to speak. Nothing like dabbing at…stuff…with a balled up wipe to teach one about finesse.
At diaper changing time, I sought courage in those famous words from Shakespeare’sHenry V:
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…”
I didn’t know beforehand if my son was going to be a boy or a girl. Turned out to be a boy, but if we had a girl my biggest fear was EXACTLY what you described. I had nightmares about having/how to clean a vagina. Stupid? Maybe. But those are the kinds of things that go through an expectant father’s head.
Awesome stuff Cole. You nailed it.