A dead language may just kill me
The following essay has been written especially for Mommybloggers by our featured blogger, Lisa Stone. We want to thank Lisa for hanging out with us and opening up so much! We have had a blast showing her many fans a new side to this amazing woman.
Now that my son is nine, I've been walking on pins and needles when he and his posse are together. Because suddenly Pokemon cards and Legos are on the outs. Sure, the boys play computer games and ball. But they also sit around and...talk. Sometimes they even whisper.
Now I'm waiting for the smack upside the head that my son is a genuine 'tween, preparing to disappear off the cliff of adolesence. There are signs. He's already asked when he can get a mohawk, what I would think if he tattooed his face, and what a condom is. But I can tell he's just testing me. He doesn't really want them. Yet.
I know what I'm looking for -- a very precise harbinger of hormones from my own past: Latin. Anatomically correct Latin, that is. I know he's going to use it. What worries me is how.
My son has some experience in this field. At age almost-three, when he was trying to figure out why his little friend Sarah was a girl and he was a boy, he got his first lesson in underpants Latin. Hey, I'm a modern single mom! I thought. I sat him right down with a cartoon book for little ones and executed what I assured myself was a matter-of-fact anatomy lesson. Well, that's that! I congratulated myself. The Talk will be no problem for moi!
There's nothing like Mother Nature to bring a girl down a peg. A few days later, the flaws in my teaching moment were revealed, as so many things are, in the frozen food section of the local grocery. As I rounded the corner of one aisle, my son looked up at me from the front seat of the grocery cart where he had been playing with his seatbelt. "MOMMY?" he inquired, in that loud, piercing outside voice he favored those days. I scuse-me'd past the cart of an older man who was waist deep into the ice cream, his back to us. I was headed for the pie. ""Uh-huh baby?" I said as I opened the freezer to check out the goods.
"SO YOU'RE SAYING THAT MEN HAVE A PENIS, AND WOMEN HAVE A BUH-GINA?" his little voice reached a fabulous high note on each term.
The oh-so-close haunches of the guy with his head in the freezer froze. Don't laugh don't laugh don't you dare laugh you stupid smug idiot, I told myself, or he'll be saying penis and vagina at every family gathering for the next ten years and everyone will know who's fault that is won't they?
The man was still in the freezer. He looked like he would stay there forever rather than turn around so that his penis faced my buh-gina.
"Yes!" I shouted, throwing pies back into the freezer. "Where is that cookie aisle?"
We escaped without forcing the poor guy to make eye contact and the issue died. Until three years later, when his stepmother was expecting another baby.
"Mom, I just don't get where babies come from," he told me one day when I picked him up from first grade. "And don't tell me about the sperm and the egg again, because I've heard it all before. I just don't get how the sperm and the egg GET in the same place." However, he assured me, he knew all about how babies were born. "How, son?" They come out where the mom poops, he said. "Everyone knows that, mom," he assured me.
Hoo boy. Out came a different book, a 1973 illustrated version of "Where do babies come from," which my clairvoyant mother had mailed me that very month. I signed my son to a blood pact that what I was about to show him was never ever to be discussed in the frozen food aisle and, somehow, we both managed to keep a straight face through the whole discussion. He was shocked, to say the least. "Daddy did that?" he asked. I was a little shellshocked myself. I couldn't believe I was discussing sex at all, since I was apparently permanently dateless and never going to get a chance to indulge in the act of sex again, much less have a baby.
We talked a lot of Latin that afternoon. I should have known that would come back to haunt me. Because that's the thing about my son: He likes to talk, just like his mother. And he likes to try out his new words. As he did the very next day, as soon as he got into the car.
"Oh mom! You packed me too much lunch today!" he said.
"I did?" I said. "You actually ate it, for once?"
"Yeah!" said my son. "I ate it all! And later my intesticles were killing me!"
Have you ever seen a station wagon with coffee spewed inside the windshield? If I ever have an aneurysm, I will credit the effort it took not to howl with laughter that day. "Ummm, honey, there are two words that sound a lot alike but they actually do very different things..." I began.
Flash forward to today. These innocent question are not the anatomically correct Latin I'm looking for. I'm on guard for a misappropriation of the terms -- and the private parts to which they refer. Because at 'tweendom, I think, boys begin the life-long process of deciding how to treat girls. As other humans -- or as less-than-equals. Or, worse yet, as objects or even things. And I worry about this.
I was nine the first time I heard Latin thus abused and knew it for what it was. I was sitting in Mrs. Lizotte's fifth grade class in Missoula, Montana, hating every hair of her beehive. Happily, to my right sat serious entertainment. Lauren Roberts, smartest boy in the class, who spent his days turning around to hatch trouble with his buddy, Dave Sales, toughest boy in the class.
David could do crazy playground hat-tricks like turn his eyelids inside out. Earlier that year, they'd thrilled us all by loosening the bolts on Lizotte's ancient wooden office chair, damn near maiming her. Yet there she stood, prepared to bully any of us. Far as I was concerned, Lauren and David had failed.
I snuck a peek at David. He grinned at me, the blood-red undersides of his eyelids popping.
"EW!" I was delighted.
Lauren turned around, his math long done, and let us have it:
"David, you clitoris," Lauren hissed.
I gasped. I gaped at David--could he possibly know what that meant? Oh yeah, he did. And from the smirk on his face, I could tell it wasn't the first time he'd heard it. David laughed. Lauren laughed.
Then they looked at my burning face, my mouth hanging open in shock. And howled.
There it was -- my first experience hearing males use female anatomy to insult each other. Pow. I cannot count the number of times I heard that word on the playground that year, or how many kids clearly knew what it meant. Lauren went on to call all of us "scrotum" at one point or another that year, but it never had the same result.
I had an immediate change of heart about old Lizotte, who clamped down on them, ended the discussion, and made it possible for me to start breathing again. Little did she or I realize, it was a girl-bonding moment.
It took a decade for me to figure out why I was so horrified and humiliated by the particular use of that term as an insult. Of course, I didn't understand then like a do now, the role the clitoris plays for women worldwide, both in pleasure and in pain (female circumcision anyone? Yes, I will judge that cultural value).
Now let's be clear -- I don't think my fifth-grade classmates understood the deeper implications of what they were doing. Hell, they insulted each other all day long. But it was the way they used their shocking new word that rattled me. Now, this was 1970s Montana, where we played a playgound tackle football game we were allowed to call "Smear the Queer." A lot went unnoticed for which my son knows I'd cheerfully roast him alive today.
But I learned something. Sit down with any sit-com or movie or computer game today, and I'll bet good money that we can identify a number of moments where the ultimate insult is delivered to men -- that they are female in some way. And the worst insult is still for one male to call another a buh-gina.
So I'm on the lookout for telltale signs that my sweet caring son, who has always had female friends and, lord knows, a strong maternal figure in his life, is heading to the dark side.
As I said, I know he's going to use these terms. What worries me is how. Because that's when the dead language of Latin may just kill me.
To read more by Lisa, please visit her at one of her blogs: BlogHer, Surfette and Legal Blog Watch.