May, 2014

In This World There Are No Answers Only Cross References

The general rule of thumb in our household is, "if you can ask the question, you deserve to get an answer." (A friend of ours with a rather, uh, colorful background adds, "Are you sure you want to hear it?") It's the way I grew up (for the most part) and Ducky—well, if he figured the adults would decline to answer, he just went to the library or a bookstore and hunted down the answer on his own. Both of us had decided, without the thought being put into actual words, that any child he or I had would not be fobbed off with "go ask your mother/father." He's a doctor, I'm a bookseller; we both deal in facts. Answering a kid's questions would be a breeze.

Enter Alexandra Caitlin Mallard.

Ignoring the fact that a three-year-old can "why?" you into a coma, if Lexi asked a question, she got an answer. If we didn't know the answer, we'd look it up. (Okay—if I didn't know the answer, I would look it up. The list of things Ducky knows off the top of his head is mind-boggling.) The ask/answer credo did not exclude the big, scary questions that make so many parents turn pale and stammer half-assed answers or mutter, "Go ask your mother/father" (or, worse, "You're too young to ask things like that!")—namely, s-e-x questions. The questions started in preschool, when one of the teachers got married and four months later was running around in maternity tops. Simple questions, simple—and age-appropriate—answers. (I had plenty of practice with my nieces and nephews.)

By kindergarten, most of the questions had been asked and answered. The most difficult was about gene pools. "Auntie Barb has green eyes. Uncow Ray has hazow eyes… How come Sharon has brown eyes and Kevin has bwoo eyes—"

It was the one and only time I said, "ask your father." But I had a better intro; I said, "Kid, when I took biology and studied Mendel, dinosaurs still roamed the earth. I don't remember squat. Let's go ask your father." For the next two hours I was able to fix dinner without disruption as they surfed the web and then ran out to Barnes & Noble and came back with some neat books on genetics. (After she was asleep, I snuck into her room and borrowed the books. It was embarrassing how much I had forgotten. Or, more likely, how little I ever learned.)

Right before the end of the school year, she was allowed to go to a slumber party—her first—and came home Saturday night in a very thoughtful mood. She sat at the kitchen table, idly coloring in a coloring book while Charlie crammed for the last exam of her—ulp!—senior year. "Mommy—what does 'knocked up' mean?"

Charlie's pen clattered to the table and she stifled a snorted giggle.

I started to answer, then caught myself, remembering a very old joke. ("Dad, where did I come from?" After the stammered answer about the birds and the bees, the kid says, "Oh. Fred's from Ohio, I was just wondering.") "Well, there are different meanings," I said, thinking of the British "knocked up" as in going to someone's house and knocking on the door. Another snort from Imp. "Could you use it in a sentence?"

"Mm-hmm. Carly's sister Jenna and her friend Maya played beauty shop and did our hair and our nails and stuff and they were talking about their best friend Kelsey and they said she's knocked up again—"

I tried not to wince. Or groan. "Um—okay…" I gave the stew another stir and set the spoon on the rest and joined the girls at the table. Charlie was ignoring her calculus book and was watching me with great interest. Brat. "You remember when we were at the mall, we passed a clothing store for pregnant women—it was called 'Great Expectations' and I explained that if a woman was 'expecting' it was another way of saying she's pregnant?" Lexi nodded. "Well… 'knocked up' is another way of saying 'pregnant.' But, generally, it's rather rude. Sometimes friends can say it and it's joking—"

Her eyes lit up. "Oh! Like the boys at the mall who were calling each other n—"

"Yes, yes!" I said hurriedly. Not a scene I wanted to revisit, thank you.

"But how come 'knocked up' means 'pregnant?'"

Of those two choices, yes, I'll take rude euphemisms for pregnancy over racial slurs for $500, Alex. I combed through what I could remember from my various etymology books. "Well, 'knock' was a slang phrase meaning 'sex.' A couple of hundred years ago, it was a slang phrase. Not any more, really, but 'knock' just slid into 'knocked up' meaning pregnant, because pregnancy is often—" (as Miss Kelsey will attest) "—a result of sex."

"Oh. Okay." Phew. It looked like the answer satisfied her, but she still looked like she was chewing on something. "Mommy…?"

"Mmh?"

"I want to ask you something."

"Fire away."

More mental gnawing. "But… it might make you uncomfortable."

Charlie turned and stared at me openly. No way in hell was she getting back to calculus.

I swallowed hard. Yeah; that's just the phrase a parent wants to hear. "Well…" I managed. "If you have a question, you ask it. If it makes me uncomfortable—that's my problem."

"Oh. Okay." She brightened. "Well—I know that if a man and a woman are in love and want to have a baby, they have sex."

We hadn't tackled surrogacy, in vitro fertilization and other extensions. So, for the basic concept… "Yep."

"Well… what if they want to have sex… but they don't want to have a baby?"

"That—is an excellent question."

She looked tickled pink. "It is? It is?"

"Yes. And one far too few teenagers ask." (Another rude noise from Charlie, and a muttered, "Kelsey sure didn't.")

I held forth for several minutes—with occasional input from Charlie—about facts and fallacies about contraception, scaled down a little. Ducky walked into the kitchen, caught the drift of the conversation, and quietly left again. Lexi's questions, he'll answer; having Charlie in the audience probably spooked him. (Chicken.)

Much later, while we were all around the coffee table, I explained what had brought the topic up in the first place. There was plenty of head-shaking to go around, especially since Carly's older sister is Charlie's age. Pregnant "again" at 16? Yikes. But there were also some laughs, especially over my "Uncomfortable?" reaction.

"You handled it with grace, common sense and knowledge, my dear." Ducky kissed my temple.

"I had to. You turned tail and ran for the hills."

'You had everything under control, anything I added would have been superfluous."

"Coward," I muttered.

"Perceptive," he said in a matching tone.

Ev reached around Lily and snagged a magazine from the end table and started flipping pages. "I think… no… ah, there it is." She folded back the cover of The New Yorker and handed it over. "Should we put this on a t-shirt?"

I looked over Ducky's shoulder and laughed. The top half of the page was a cartoon by an artist I didn't recognize right off the bat. It showed a family in the front yard—mom, dad, a passel of kids, with mom and dad waving brooms and bats to ward off the incoming flight: a stork with a baby dangling from its' beak.

The five of us (Mother having already retired) chuckled over the cartoon and Lexi scrambled over from her side of the table. "Lemmesee, lemmesee!" She looked at the cartoon and frowned. "I don't get it."

"They don't want the stork to bring another baby," Lily explained.

Lexi frowned more deeply and shrugged. "I still don't get it."

It suddenly dawned on me that Lexi had always gotten the straight scoop from us: she had never run into the "stork bringing a baby" myth. It hit Ducky about the same time, and we both burst into laughter. Ev and Lily caught on and joined in the I-can't-catch-my-breath-to-answer-you feeding on each other laughter.

Lexi looked at us, first baffled, then irritated. It just made us laugh all the more. Finally she folded her arms and flumped onto the sofa next to Charlie. "That's what I hate about this family! Nobody tells you anything!"

A/N As so often, right out of real life. The only thing missing was my daughter's declaration that she was not the result of *that*—she popped onto the planet parthenogenetically…