because I can

The other night, while grabbing a drink from the kitchen, while chatting with svmadelyn (may her internet connection stay true, because withdrawal was so not pretty for me. Her. Me. This is really about me. IT HURT), Child waylaid me to question Jack's feelings about Ianto if he was going to look at Gwen like that.

I ended up typing the entire thing to her, but I remember a small, warm feeling in the pit of my stomach, chased by blank horror when I realized he'd tricked me into a sex ed conversation. I also do not remember what I ended up saying--for those around at the time, you may remember how that one ended up with several people wondering if he'd end up building a nest in the backyard after I inadvertently mentioned eggs--but I'm pretty sure sex ed should not be a five second recital on "some men like other men and some men like women and some like both which is perfectly normal, please don't do this to me right now" while Child cackled in the background.



Mostly, though, after explaining "Do not ever say anything ever to your grandfather, please" and "Wait, how did you get the new episode?" and "Oh, never mind, I have that one," and "No, we can't build a TARDIS, God," I sat down to ruminate on how a lot of Child's sex ed is less lecture and more life. Two sisters pregnant have stripped the miracle of childbirth of its miracle, "Did you know babies come out of the vagina?" says Child when my middle sister was pregnant with her first. To my Uncle. At Christmas. When he was like, five.

He didn't know to be curious why Jack was dating Ianto, just worried their love would be destroyed by Gwen (I can't even begin to come up with a theory on that one), and his school buddies introduced him to the concepts of women and mud wrestling and women and bikinis, which he seems to appreciate on an aesthetic level. He's about the right age, if memory serves, for small boys to tell each other deeply, disturbingly explicit, proportionally impossible porn stories "My brother said he dated this girl with boobs as big as watermelons!" Our next door neighbor girl (his best friend, it's like TV! But in my life) has a crush on a singer and got a shirt with his name on it; Child sulked for a week.

He tells us he feels surges of hormones, "I can feel the hormones surging through my body," he confides. "How?" I ask, curious. "You know. Things are growing." Me: "Something is growing?" "You know," he says, voice dropping. "Grown up things."

(No freaking clue; I handed him over to my sister and told her to make sure he didn't have some kind of growth or wasn't turning blue; she had to swear she'd never tell me the truth. Now she giggles a lot. She's pregnant, so I have to be kind; later, though. Later. After gestation has passed? She's telling me. What if he's blue? It won't go with his uniform.)

Last year, a little Egyptian girl at school paid him to be her bodyguard, "They make fun of her" he told me, bewildered. "She wears this thing on her head." "Scarf?" "Yeah." So I told him what a burqa (spelling?) was and why I can never take him to certain countries, why I may never see a pyramid, why I might not see the Taj Mahal. Then I told him to give her back the quarter. He already had. "She has cookies," he told me. I completely understood.

Actually, a lot of the teachers wear those as well, from simple scarves to long robes so comfortable I kind of want one of those myself, so I suspect it might have been her home country that was a problem, though he wasn't clear and I was too amused by the idea of my average-height, plump, fair-skinned and fair-haired kid arms crossed acting muscle on the playground to remember to ask. In his age group, I don't think any of the girls wear the head scarves, though in the upper grades, I think I saw some that do.

For Black History Month, they went through a huge number of famous figures that I don't remember ever being in my history books, and I kind of wish they had. He tried out for Martin Luther King and I grinned and listened to him work through the dialogue and tried not to laugh; he ended up third reverend to the right who came to talk to Dr. King during his time in jail. He was empathetic and slammed his tiny fist on the desk. I have no clue what anyone was saying, but every time they came up on stage, I couldn't help but smile. For some reason, empathetic eleven year olds never stop being utterly adorable, every darn one of them.

He tells me Hello and Goodbye in Turkish, blushes when I ask him to speak it for me; it's pretty when he says it, and I like to listen to him when he does. He still likes holding hands. He wants a kiss before he goes to school and before he goes to bed. He still wants to clone me and the Crocodile Hunter. Today, I have decided its cute. Tomorrow, I'll remember I need to explain federal law again. In detail.

I'm Mom, Mommy, Jenn, Jenn, Jenn-I-Furrrrrr and sometimes "Jenny", which will never stop being funny.

I'm kinda infatuated with my kid. In case you didn't notice.



And back on medication. I remember this feeling. It's called being productive.