Fudging the Sex Talk

Sooooooo, yeah. I shoulda seen this one coming. The boys and I started flipping through photo albums of when they were babies and there happened to be a few pics of yours truly with what looked to be three watermelons under my shirt.

"Mom, what's wrong with your stomach?" Julian asks.

Haha. You were wrong with it, I want to say. But I'm not that mean (usually). "You were in there, Julian."

"WHAT?!"

"You were. I swear. No joking."

"NO WAY!!"

"Seriously."

"And where was Ian?"

I point to a picture of Ian with sweet potatoes mashed all over his face, including up his nose and dabbled across every single eyelash. "Here he is. Eating." Ian is alarmed by this photo of himself. He is even more alarmed by another picture of himself with a green bean in his ear, as if his hearing might have been at risk.

"Why do I have food all over my face?" Ian looks at me accusingly, as if I should have done something to prevent this.

"Because you didn't like to eat. We had trouble getting the spoon in your mouth because you kept moving your head. And you spit a lot of stuff out that we had to scrape up and put back in your mouth."

Ian's face is contorting while he's listening to me, a giant facial 'ewwwwwwww'. All the while, Julian has been quiet, staring out the window at the two tomato plants on our little patch of a balcony. We are desperately trying to cultivate them so we can eat at least one tomato before it's time to go back to school.

"Mom?" Julian says dreamily, still looking out the window.

"Yes?"

"But Mom? If I was in your belly, then how did I get out?" He flips both palms up in the air like he does whenever an idea totally confounds him and seems to be something that would have to also confound the whole world. A mystery. A totally impossible thing to explain. Like why he has to go to bed at night.

So what can I say? This is indeed a totally confounding question. I remember when I looked on the EPT stick at dinnertime on January 10, 2005 and saw those lines when I was pregnant with Ian, the first pregnancy, and the immediate thought I had was "How is he going to get out?" I felt like I had just been put on a massive log flume and had no choice but to get DAMN soaked before I was let off of it. No choice.

Ian did get out, and so did Julian, but it wasn't pretty. I look down at Julian now and consider giving him the real answer, but then I remember that he is only three years old. I think about my husband, much older than three, and how he looked when Ian and Julian got out. Like he had just smelled very, very bad milk and he would never drink milk again. He has made me swear that this subject, or anything related to it, like menstrual cramps, will never be discussed in our house.

So I really have no choice but to fudge my answer to Julian. So I just say "It was magic." Which if you think about, isn't entirely a fudge. It was.