Raising my husband’s daughter

Posted by Breeze on Friday, December 14, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Category: Breeze

I’ve recently been confronted with my own prudishness in the form of my 3 1/2 year old’s interest in menstruation and the intricacies of conception. She has questions; she wants answers; I shudder at what comes out of my mouth and fear what strange versions of it will come out of hers.

It all started when she wanted to know more than the old “the baby came out of Mommy’s belly” story. My girl is smart, and what smart kid doesn’t eventually ask how the baby got in there? We were driving down the road, and my first answer was that love puts babies in there. Then I decided that that was potentially embarrassing and came up with something more technical but still simple enough that she might understand it. Yes, I did use the phrase “when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much.” It’s embarrassing to admit, but in my defense, kids don’t generally ask these questions at times when their parents can focus, and if the parent is too busy running the possible misinterpretations of what she is about to say through her head to think creatively, the parent may just freeze up. I am such a parent. After several repeats of the question, I have decided that our official line is that Daddy and I wanted a baby, so he helped me to put the baby in there.

Lucky me; all my problems were solved, at least until I started menstruating again. When last I had a period, way back in June of 2006 before Daddy loved me so much that he helped me make a baby (See? It is embarrassing!), little Tulip, the not quite 2 years old Tulip, didn’t even notice that something was going on when I menstruated. A year and a half later I still don’t get to the bathroom alone much, but this time around I have a potty trained big girl watching my every move.

Today she wanted to know what the red stuff in the potty was. I’m not really so embarrassed about the topic this time, just worried I’ll freak her out. I don’t want her to think of it as bleeding because she associates that with injury. I tried telling her that it was a period to avoid calling it blood. Then I tried to explain that women have periods every month and that it’s the body’s way of cleaning out a woman’s belly when it doesn’t have a baby in it. She looked at my face, looked down at the toilet again, and stepped out of the room. This is the part where I explain that she has her father’s sense of humor and timing. She waited a beat, stuck her head back into the room, said “Vulva!” with a laugh and ran out to play with Daddy and the baby again in the other room.