by Steve Doocy
“Mommy, where’s her penis?”
Relying upon a parenting book that was clearly written by somebody who’d never had children, Kathy answered the question honestly and clinically. Pointing to the no-man’s-land on the bottom of his sister, my wife gave him the lowdown.
“Peter, boys have penises and girls have vaginas.”
His face screwed up a little as if she’d just described, strand by strand, the chemical makeup of DNA; it was clear all he’d heard was a new word that started with a v.
“Mom, I know we live in Virginia. Where’s her penis?”
Virginia, vagina, let’s call the whole thing off.
Kathy perfectly addressed the issue, answering his sex question honestly and directly. Within seconds it was in one ear and out the other as he moved on to worrying about a moth he spied outside the screen window that he was afraid would get into the house that night and eat his eyebrows.
The next day as my wife and children were in the checkout lane at Safeway, Peter watched Bob the checker ring up the groceries. Bob was having a nice conversation with my wife, who was carrying our new baby girl in a Snugli, and apparently Peter was feeling a little left out of the conversation, so he decided to join in.
“My sister has a penis in her butt.”
Bob slowed down a moment to look directly at our eldest son. My wife said it got very warm in the store.
“Yesterday I saw a penis in her butt!”
Bob continued his stare of suspicion and probably pushed the secret button under the counter to alert child welfare authorities of a child predator in checkout line 3.
Bob was not a parent. He was a part-time produce guy who would have appreciated my mother’s rubber-tree book. He didn’t know that Peter had seen his sister peeing, with it running down her backside, or that Peter had been told that “boys have penises and girls have vaginas.” Nor did he know that kids’ brains work like martini shakers, adding up to the grocery store epiphany “My sister has a penis in her butt.”
My wife could have explained what had happened, and Peter would surely have backed her up, but at that moment she didn’t feel she owed it to the man who’d given her the identical stink eye when she inadvertently tried to cash an expired coupon for a dollar off Yo-plait yogurt cups.
Peter’s public comments and questions about sex lay dormant for seven years until the family was watching breakfast television during the impeachment testimony regarding Monica the “Clintern.”
“What’s oral sex?” Peter queried over Frosted Mini Wheats, repeating something he’d just heard the commentators mention.
The fastest-thinking spinmeister I’ve ever met, his mother answered almost automatically. “Oral means talk,” she said as he nodded. “So oral sex is when you talk about sex.”
A fantastic and seemingly plausible answer, it shut him up until later in the day when he probably told his classmates, “My poor parents, they don’t know what oral sex is.”
A funny thing happened on the way to the sex talk for my son. The longer I waited to tell him, the harder and harder it got, until late in his high school years I had the feeling that I would procrastinate until I was face-to-face with my son in the coatroom at his wedding reception, just before he got into the limo for his honeymoon in a Poconos champagne-glass bathtub.
But then one day, it was time. Between my son’s sophomore and junior years in high school he and his cousin Dane would spend their summer at Oxford, land of rampant beer drinking and girls with cute Kate Winslet accents that boys dug. I had prepared in my head a speech that stressed abstinence, and would ask him, if he ever met a girl and fell in love with her and then engaged in the “whole nine yards,” what would be left for the next date, a kidney transplant?
For this superdelicate, once-in-a-lifetime father-son talk, I chose the intimate and confidential location of Yankee Stadium. Sometime around the seventh-inning stretch, I decided it was time as we sat there in a cone of silence, surrounded by forty-eight thousand drunk guys.
“Listen, Peter, while you’re away you may find yourself…” That was as far as I got.
“Dad, don’t.”
“Things may happen—”
“We don’t have to talk about this now.” He squirmed.
“There are things you haven’t seen on cable—”
“Please, Dad, stop it!”
“Why?”
“They explained it all in health class, okay?”
The sweaty palms, the seventeen-year fear that he’d hear what it was all about and the sky would darken as had happened to me, all that for naught? It was true, thanks to our outrageously high local property taxes, our public school system employed a qualified instructor to give the sex talk for every parent in the district. I’d seen “health class” on his grade card, but it hadn’t dawned on me that that was code for “sex ed,” which was taught by one of the no-nonsense coaches, who was as subtle as a daisy cutter bomb.
One week the heath class instructor sent a note home that read: “Next week we’ll be following our sexual education curriculum. Don’t be shocked if your ninth grader brings up how to use a latex dam.”
How dare they usurp my parental authority and responsibility? some parents probably thought, but my immediate reaction was what’s a latex dam and what was the matter with the old-fashioned concrete kind?
Health class had done my dirty work, covering first, second, and third bases and sliding into home plate. Later I remembered that my son had gotten an A in health class; maybe he could answer a few questions for his father, who was officially off the hook sex ed–wise for the rest of his life because our two girls would be the responsibility of my wife.
“What kind of birth control do you and Dad use, or are you in menopause?” My middle girl, Mary, asked my wife a litany of prickly questions each day after health class. Thankfully, when Peter took the class he never uttered a word about it, but his sister could not have been more different. Mary wanted her mother’s take on family planning, organ function, and maintenance.
“My teacher says it’s common for people to give their private parts nicknames. Do you and Dad have nicknames for your private parts?” An icy glare was her answer, and despite it being an inappropriate question to raise in front of her younger sister, she was not punished, because our family had just outlawed waterboarding. Meanwhile Sally, barely a teenager during that exchange, had no idea what Mary was talking about, but giggled because her sister said “private parts.”
In the upcoming year, our youngest child will be enrolled in that infamous health class, where the coach indelicately explains the ins and outs of sex. Our first two children picked up their working knowledge of it that way, but in my heart I think it is still a parent’s responsibility. That revelation came to me as I was driving Sally home from swim practice, when I announced a U-turn and pulled into our nearby Barnes & Noble, where, deep in the used-book bin, I found a thirty-five-year-old bestseller with a rubber tree on the cover.
“If you have any questions, ask Mom,” I said, handing her the Time-Life classic. “If you need me, I’ll be at the Yankee game.”
16
Worry
Don’t Fall Off That Volcano
My nine-year-old daughter had been gone thirty seconds too long, and I was pretending to listen to our tour guide but wondering what was taking so long. A landmark moment, it was the first time I’d ever let her go to the ladies’ room on her own without me standing sentry in case there was screaming, so I could burst through the door for a rescue. But truthfully the only toilet sounds I’ve heard from my children are not the kind of noises you run toward.
A tug from behind, and Sally grabbed my hand and pulled me down close to her face to whisper, “Daddy, there was a weird old guy who talked to me in the bathroom.”
Weird old guy in the bathroom?
A moment ago I was worried that she’d been abducted, had her hair dyed, and been shipped off to Venezuela to be sold into some child-slavery thing, bu
t that was my automatic worst-case-scenario fear. This was a real problem, and I hadn’t been there for my girl.
“He jiggled the doorknob, and as soon as I opened the door he barged in. Daddy, I was scared.”
“Stay here,” I said, pushing her into the immediate vicinity of her mother, and I quickly rounded the corner to stand next to the restroom so I could lasso the sicko who had startled my little girl. The only reason I’d allowed her to make the fifty-foot trip down the hall and around the corner was because we were in the most secure office building in the world. Inside I could hear the water running; in a moment he’d be out and I’d let him have it. I had waited for this moment twenty years guarding bathroom doors for my three kids. Standing vigil, I’d lost count of the number of odd looks I’d gotten from adult nonparents who wondered why that grown man was loitering outside the john. “Just waiting for Junior,” I’d say, and point toward the door.
Sure, Perv Griffin.
Toilet sentinel is a father’s job, and finally I had somebody who had done something that scared one of my children, and it was time for me to give him a piece of my limited mind. The doorknob turned and suddenly I was nose to nose with the scary bathroom barger-inner, Donald Rumsfeld.
“You’re next,” Rumsfeld said with a smile as he walked past me.
Shell-shocked and flash-frozen like Lot’s wife, I stepped into the restroom, which was within fifty feet of the Oval Office. Rumsfeld was obviously heading into a meeting with his boss, the commander in chief, and wanted to make sure he could listen to an hour of Crawford talk without having to excuse himself to the boys’ room. Moments earlier I had been prepared to lecture him on bathroom etiquette, but he was the secretary of defense, so if I yelled at him we might return home to find smoldering rubble and the tail fin from a cruise missile.
After flushing the West Wing toilet with my foot, I vowed that this would be the last White House tour our family took on a full bladder. As I walked back, a random thought entered my mind. I’d been in the bathroom after Sally before, and I wondered whether, when Rumsfeld went in there, he was greeted with what the Department of Defense might consider nerve gas.
“Sally, I saw the man you were talking about. Do you know who he is?” I asked. She shook her head. Then I followed up with the more delicate question of air quality. “After your visit are they going to have to retile?” That was our family’s way of gauging how long to wait before another human should enter the facility in question.
She giggled. The British torched the White House once, so I was happy to hear Sally answer in the negative, because she was our one child who had the uncanny talent of turning a respectable restroom into a hazmat scene.
Mothers mother, fathers fret. I worry about my kids all the time. Will somebody bother them in the bathroom? Will they grow up happy? Will they make the team? Can I afford their college? Will they marry somebody who surfs the Net without pants?
My friend Jeisohn told me, “My father was soooooo worried when I was a teenager that I might be gay.”
This was apparently a common worry of some fathers. Another acquaintance told me that when he came home with an earring, his father’s body went limp. “You know, son, the only ones with earrings are gays and pirates,” his father said. “So there better be a boat in the front yard.”
Meanwhile Jeisohn’s father worried that his son would grow up a homosexual. “He wanted to toughen me up, so he sent me for the summer to work on a trawler.”
When he arrived dockside, the captain assessed his seaman skills and then assigned Jeisohn to breakfast duty, where he would operate the toaster, and when he wasn’t lightly browning, he’d be tanning on the bow of the boat while the fishing was going on in the back.
His father wanted to get his son’s thoughts off of men, yet he’d inadvertently marooned him in the Mediterranean on a small ship watching sweaty shirtless sailors flex and strain hours on end, dragging heaving nets of seafood onto the boat. It was perhaps the last place on earth his father should have sent him, considering Father’s concerns. So did the summer toughen him up? Absolutely—he eventually became a logger in the Pacific Northwest and dressed in lumberjack shirts from the Bob the Builder collection.
Just kidding. He moved to New York City to be a hairdresser.
Worry is in the DNA of dads. It’s a natural thought process that starts when the nurse makes the inky footprints of the baby, and doesn’t end until they toe-tag the father.
I was driving somewhere one night when Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” came on the radio, the song where the dad laments after his son has grown up that his boy never calls or visits because when he was young, his dad was too busy to play with him, and now the old man is alone.
Listening to Harry’s sorry saga, I wondered whether I’d spent enough time with my son, because later that month he was moving to college. I had to make sure our last few days together would be something that he’d never forget.
“Peter, we’re going to bike down a volcano!”
I knew when he heard “bike down a volcano” he envisioned the two of us on NASA-engineered carbon fiber mountain bikes wearing asbestos space suits careening down the side just as the volcano blows sky-high chunks of magma the size of Volkswagens.
Flying low over the Pacific on our final approach it was hard to miss Mount Haleakala—it makes up 75 percent of the island of Maui. The name Haleakala is Hawaiian for “house of the sun,” but they should really call it “house of the early wake-up call” because to make sure that we were up at the top in time for sunrise, the bike tour company picked us up in a van at our hotel at one thirty in the morning. I had been sound asleep nine minutes before the annoyed hotel operator told us to get the hell up.
To wake up I sucked down a double espresso mega mocha venti Coolatta that my wife insisted I consume, so that I was completely coherent when I had the boy in my control, because our son was our financial future, and I wasn’t supposed to let anything bad happen to him, because one day he would be a prosperous businessman who’d reward his parents with a luxury retirement villa in Provence, since they had sacrificed so much. I’d carried my lunch every day to work for thirty years, and his mother had bought off-the-rack Ann Taylor when she really wanted Prada. Nothing would happen on my watch to our future gravy train.
We arrived at the volcano bike base camp in the middle of the night, where thrill seekers were issued all manner of lifesaving safety equipment. We would be personally outfitted, as soon as we signed waivers that said if we were killed our heirs would not sue the bike company that had made our tragic deaths in paradise possible.
“You didn’t designate a next of kin,” the kid with the earring in his eyebrow reminded me as he pointed me to a blurry line on the living will and organ-donor form.
For the first time I realized that despite the glorious color photos on the Internet, there was an actual danger component to riding down a volcano; after all, when you ride the teacups at Disney World they don’t first make you fill out a form giving away your spleen.
At approximately three thirty in the morning we had left the base camp and were approaching the entrance to the volcano road. We’d been in Maui for days and never actually seen the top of the mountain, because it was so incredibly high that there were always clouds surrounding the peak, which added to the mystery. In the dead of night the only thing you could see was whatever the headlights carved out straight ahead. I could not see how far down the cliffs went, so I figured the federal government surely would not let the general public mount a volcano unless it was completely safe, and I convinced myself that barely beyond my view were huge safety nets, just in case.
“Anybody ever go over the side?” I asked the driver.
Pointing dead ahead he said, “Actually, a couple from Germany missed that corner,” and then he made a gesture with his hand flying straight away from his chest followed by a nose-diving gesture punctuated with a splat sound he made with his mouth that sounded like somebody jus
t had gas, which woke up Peter.
“Don’t worry, though,” he assured us. “I haven’t lost anybody since Tuesday.” It was a Wednesday morning.
After a forty-five-minute climb up the volcano we pulled into the parking lot at the summit. Ten thousand twenty-three feet above sea level, and according to the dashboard thermometer it was thirty-five degrees outside.
“If I’m on a flaming volcano, why am I freezing?” inquired my son, who was probably expecting a molten crater of fire where the locals were about to throw a virgin into the abyss.
The doors to the vans were closed to keep the warm air in and the cold out, but after about fifteen minutes the smell of exhaust fumes was so thick, I could feel my brain stem throbbing, and I worried that when it was time to bike down, I’d be so high I’d say, “Time to fly…,” and forget to take that left turn like the German tourists and wind up in the big schnitzel stand in the sky.
“Let’s get some fresh air,” I said to my son, who would have preferred to lose a few million brain cells stewing in the warm truck fumes, rather than traipse around a volcano top with his old man. “Watch your step out there,” the guide told us. “We had a guy fall off the face in April…. They only found his shoes.”
The summit in the pitch black was as dark a place as I’d ever been in my life, a fact not lost on the federal government. Years earlier Uncle Sam’s scientists had calculated that because this volcano summit was located above one-third of the atmosphere, and the air was clear and dry and still, and there was virtually no light reflection from major cities, this was the best place on the planet to see things at night, so they’d hauled in the world’s strongest telescopes and pointed them mostly at the stars, although supposedly one was constantly trained on a Honolulu high-rise popular with Swedish flight attendants.
Not only was it dark, it was dead quiet, the kind of scary silence in movies just before the T. rex leans out from behind the palm tree and eats the cave girl.