Parenting humor: The facts of life, traffic lights and taps

The facts of life, traffic lights and taps

"When I grow up, can I have a baby in my tummy?" our four year old asked as my wife and I drove him home from his child-care centre.

Er. How should we answer that?

Our four-year-old is a boy named Jack.

My wife Katherine explained to him that only girls grew up to have babies, though she said that when boys grew up they could help to make the babies. The baby was thus the product of two sets of genes.
Jack did not ask how exactly this was achieved.

Thank goodness.

I find it very hard to concentrate on driving while trying to explain the facts of life to a four-year-old.

(Katherine was driving but I also find it very hard to explain the facts of life to a four-year-old while I am a passenger.)
Jack did not seem fussed.
He was more preoccupied with the traffic lights ahead of us.

"Green means cold and read means hot," he announced, obviously proud of himself.

"Um, no, not in this case," I said. "I think you are getting mixed up with taps?"

Katherine diplomatically changed the subject.

"How was school today, Jack," she asked.

"Good," he said.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Oh dear, I can't remember," he said, gently slapping a hand on the side of his head.

He has probably seen me doing that when I have strayed from my low-fat diet at lunch-time and Katherine wants to know how come I have cream-cake stains on my neck tie.

"You must remember something, Jack," I said. "You only left 30 seconds ago!"

Well, there was one thing.
He said one of the carers at the centre had "a baby growing inside her tummy."

"Who told you?" I asked. I figured that someone must have told him, seeing as he had undoubtedly inherited the gene that fails to alert males in my family to these things until the seventh or eighth month of gestation, even in close families.
I don't know how many times, my wife has informed me that so-and-so had just had a baby.

"Really! I didn't even know she was pregnant," I say.

"We only saw her two weeks ago. You must have noticed then."

"I just thought she had put on some weight."

With the benefit of some major hindsight and some minor bodily harm, I realise now that this is the wrong thing to say.

It is a bad thing to suggest to a pregnant woman that she is putting on weight. It is equally bad to suggest to a formerly pregnant woman - ie: Katherine - that currently pregnant or even recently unpregnant woman are/were carrying a few extra pounds.
This goes to the heart of a little chat I've been meaning to have with Jack in a few years' time.

"She told us she had a baby growing in her tummy," Jack said matter-of-factly.

Really?

When I was a boy, I can't remember anyone ever telling us anything about how babies came about.
Sure, we had theories in the playground of our little nun-run Catholic school.

There was the stork.

And the cabbage patch.

We did learn about the Virgin Mary, and her immaculate conception - whatever that was. The nuns didn't go into detail.

I am pretty sure Mary had an immaculate pregnancy, too, because she whenever I saw illustrations of her on the donkey in Bethlehem it was never very obvious to me she had a baby inside her tummy either.

"Did you know, Jack, that when you were inside mummy's tummy you used to move around a lot?" I said, craning my neck around in the car again to see the expression on his face.
"You used to hiccup, too, and kick. I expected you to be born with tap-dance shoes on."

Jack just looked at me, frowning.

I knew that look.

That is the look he inherited from Katherine: the one she reserves for moments after I have done or said something particularly stupid.

A baby with dancing shoes on! Ha! As if babies tap!

"Daddy, I think you are mixing taps up with traffic lights," Jack said.

©January 11, 2001 John Martin. All Rights Reserved

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