Living Large is a monthly column about the strange (at least from the outside looking in) lifestyle of a modern, large family.
My mom was fairly open-minded for a boomer when it came to talking about sex with pre-teen me but I asked questions so embarrassing and flummoxing that she clammed up and didn’t do the same with my siblings. I didn’t deliberately freak my mother out. I wasn’t trying to be antagonistic, I just had no filter.
Let me add this before I continue: I believe that parents should be the ones to have these conversations with their children, uncomfortable as they are, because there is a lot of misinformation out there about sex, dating and relationships and it’s very easy for young minds to be groomed and confused.
Okay, now that that is out of my system… My mom never told me outright the effects my questions had on her but I overheard her telling my aunt about it and she concluded with “today the children know too much, too early”.
As an adult, I agree. Children do know too much, too early. Our modern world is highly sexualised and try as we might, we can’t protect our children’s innocence forever — and believe me, we have tried.
In our home, we are very strict about screens and what’s on them but as soon as our children started school that parental filter was interrupted. Their classmates are exposed to different levels of sexualisation and therefore children experience secondary exposure through conversations with their friends, cellphones, the curriculum or worse.
Over the years we’ve had some curious discussions about boomchikkawukkachow — as sex is called for discussion purposes in our house. The first was with Eldest, our most naturally demure child. When I initiated the conversation, boys had started noticing her and I decided it was time to have the talk.
By then she already understood a lot, most of which she’d picked up at school, but we talked about the serious stuff and I told her that she could not start dating until she was 16 and explained to her the dangers of casual relationships and boomchikkawukkachow.
A few months later, we drove past one of Eldest’s acquaintances.
A quick aside — Eldest has a mild, undiagnosed learning difficulty that causes her to struggle with time concepts, confuse letters and numbers and have general reading difficulties, which she has thankfully mostly, overcome.
On this particular day, on noticing her friend’s sister, she sighed deeply and tragically, and said: “That’s Carol’s sister. (Let’s call her Carol). Carol said that she is very naughty and just wants to do, (blushes furiously) C, E, X.”
I’m trying hard to concentrate on my driving, especially since I have a car full of wriggling children, so I’m only half focused on what she is saying. The spelling error doesn’t register and I’m genuinely confused.
“What is that?”
She gives me a scandalised look.
“Do you want me to say that word in front of my sisters?”
That’s the day the word “boomchikkawukkachow” was born in our family.
My middle daughter’s boomchikkawukkachow education came from an unlikely source, her cousin of the same age. They were both eight years old at the time. (Too young. Far, far, far too young for this conversation in my opinion😞)
We were cleaning the kitchen together when she gave me a look that warned me she had something big on her mind.
“Mommy,” she said. “How do babies get inside mommies’ tummies?”
I was still overcoming my shock and gathering my thoughts when she carried right on.
“Cousin A said, that babies get inside mommies’ tummies by, (blushing furiously) boomchickawukkachow.”
At this point, her concept of boomchikkawukkachow was French kissing, which she’d seen on TV. I took a big breath and prepared to give the intended talk a bit earlier than I would have liked but she pleadingly said: “It’s not true hey, mommy?”
She then related the rest of the conversation which was pretty much Cousin A admitting to wheedling the information out of my sister — all the information — when she was no longer satisfied with the details of my sister’s previous, milder explanation. Armed with the new superior knowledge she could not wait to report this to her closest cousin, my daughter.
I told Suzuki the truth then, much to her innocent embarrassment.
Another surprise early questioner was Gymnovert, who at six wanted to know how the baby got inside my tummy when I was pregnant with Wheaty.
Cringing that this conversation seemed to be happening earlier and earlier with my children, I said: “Mommies have eggs in their tummies. When mommies and daddies love each other, the daddy’s egg meets the mommy’s egg and makes a baby.”
Out of all her sisters, Gymnovert is the most mothering and the most eager to talk about being a mother one day. She then said, with a look of deep thought; “Do all girls have eggs in their tummies?”
The nerd in me rejoiced at this question so much that I forgot to cautiously ponder where this was headed. I excitedly said: “Yes, all girls have eggs in their tummies, even when they are babies.”
Gymnovert then asked: “So, can I also get a baby in my tummy from loving?”
“Not yet,” I said, mentally kicking myself. “Only when you’re old enough.”
This conversation resurfaced, in an hilarious way, many, many months later, after I had long forgotten about it.
Gymnovert, now seven, was playing with Wheaty, who was at the age where she could identify her body parts.
Gymnovert: “Where’s your eyes?”
Wheaty: (points to her eyes)
Gymnovert: “Well done. And where are your ears?”
This carries on in a similar fashion until Gymnovert says: “Wheaty, where’s your eggies?”
Wait! What?
Wheaty pats her tummy and Gymnovert exclaims delightedly, “Well done, there’s Wheaty’s eggies.”
“Gymnovert,” I ask, “what are you talking about?”
She gives me a condescending look and says: “The eggies in her tummy that’s going to become babies one day.”
I still have a few more of these conversations to go but I’ve learned, from chatting to my friends who also parent large families, that these kinds of questions do tend to come up earlier when a child sees their mom pregnant so frequently and wonders: “How did my sibling get in there in the first place?”
Next up: Figuratively speaking – finding humour in the loss of my physique
