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Freeze! Where do babies come from?
November 1, 2009
Guest Post by Jen Singer
It happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly, I actually froze for a moment, as though, if I stood completely still, my son might forget the question he’d just asked me.
“How’s the baby gonna get out of her tummy?” my kindergartener asked one snowy winter morning. He was talking about our neighbor, who was nearly nine-months pregnant with her fourth child. His little brother, a preschooler, seemed equally interested in the answer.
I panicked while stories about storks and vague answers involving hospitals raced through my head. And then I thought the better of it. Why not tell him the truth? Not the gory, painful truth with all the details, but the basic mechanics of how babies are born?
“Well, she’s having surgery to take the baby out,” I explained. “The doctor will make it so she can’t feel her belly, and then cut it open and take the baby.”
My boys looked deep in thought.
“But only some babies come out that way,” I added. “Usually, babies come out of a little tunnel in the mommy’s body called a vagina…” But I didn’t want to leave it on that word, lest it would stick with them. No doubt someone would go naming their toy truck “Vagina,” and then what would I do when my mother-in-law came over? So I kept on talking until that wasn’t the last word.
Then I watched my son’s face carefully as he processed the information. Next, he opened his mouth, and I knew what he was about to ask:
“Well, how’d the baby get in there in the first place?”
Again, I froze. Again, I thought about storks and vague stories of mommies and daddies loving each other very much. But at this point, I was committed to the whole story – to the truth. I blurted out something about penises and vaginas and love and marriage and sperm and eggs and when it was all done, I held my breath. But my son just shrugged and left the room. His little brother went back to playing, and I unfroze.
In the weeks that followed, I reiterated the story with fewer nerves, and when they got older, I explained it again with age appropriate details. Though I hadn’t expected to be so frank when they were so young, it turned out to be the best way for us to handle explaining the birds and the bees. Now as they barrel toward puberty, it’s easier for us all to talk about the tough stuff. You know, as soon as I unfreeze.
Jen Singer is the author of Stop Second-Guessing Yourself – The Preschool Years (HCI September 2009). She publishes mommasaid.net, the “back porch of the internet.”
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