Lying to my kids

Again, I'm a liar. Normally I'm a pretty honest person, but when you are watching a PG movie with a 10 year old, sometimes you're taken aback by some of the jokes.

We rented the movie RV the other day. There is a scene where Robin Williams' character is visiting with another trailer park family.
Jeff Daniel's character brags that his wife makes $60K a year without ever leaving their trailer. Robin Williams says, "How? Hooking?"

Now this is the moment that my husband and I hoped that That wouldn't have picked up on. We had hoped That's incredible inattention to detail would kick in. Heck, the boy only hears every other word you say. Why did he have to pick up on "hooking?"

Foolish me, in response to the line, I said, "no, he did NOT just say that..."

Of course, this is what made That's ears perk up. I held my breath and the dreaded question came.

"Mom, what is hooking?"

I could have gone a couple ways with this. I suppose I could have just told the truth, but considering that Princess was also listening now, I had to change the joke into a completely G-rated one.

"Hooking is another word for fishing."

"Fishing? But then why did you say 'he did not just say that'?"

Great. Now he listens to everything I say? "Well, because fishing is only for men to do. Women don't fish, obviously. That would be an insult to her."

I held my breath again.

"That's not even funny."

Yay, I won that one.

But in telling my friend Julia about the situation the next day, she was surprised that I didn't come clean with the real thing. I've always been a proponent to telling the truth about sex and talking about it early on. That way the kids aren't freaked out when you finally start talking about sex. Waiting until they hit puberty is way too late. See, they get desensitized to you talking about it if you start early. You get over the heebies around talking to your kids about sex a lot quicker if you start practicing early. Like when they're 2 weeks old. They tend not to ask a lot of questions then.

I told Julia that I am open about normal healthy sex. Not dysfunctional objectified sex. I also told her that I would not be discussing EVERYTHING there is to know about sex with my kids. Like if That asked me what S&M was, I'd look him square in the eyes and tell him that it was spaghetti and meatballs.

Julia has first hand knowledge about the horror of talking to kids about sex. It is so much easier when they can't ask you questions. While she was driving, her 3 kids were in the back seat: her son B was 12, son A was 9, and daughter T was 7. At school, B's class was talking about the AIDS epidemic which of course led to a conversation about modes of transmission. And the inevitable question, "What is sex?"

The way Julia tells the story, she gripped the steering wheel as tightly as she could and tried to answer the questions truthfully but using the least amount of words she could manage.

"Well, sex is what a man and woman do to have a baby."

"How?" asked B.

She said that by this point you could see that her knuckles were completely white. No small task, considering that she's half Mexican.

"The man puts his penis in the woman's vagina and then his sperm can join with her egg to make a baby."

Blessed silence followed for only a few moments.

A piped up, "So Dad put his penis in your vagina?"

Thank goodness the steering wheel was made of sturdy stuff.

A, totally grossed out, queried, "How long did he leave it in there?"

Someone was looking out for them that day as there were no cars directly in front of theirs. There could easily have been an accident. And what would Julia have to say in her defense? "Sorry officer, my kids were asking me about sex."

A asked one more thing in a tone that clearly showed that he thought it disgusting, "Did you like it?"

I'm thankful that Julia didn't crash her car and managed to squeak out, "Go ask your father."

I gotta say, I'm glad I told That all about sex when he was an infant. He knows all there is to know. We even went over the proper spelling of fallopian tubes. He was a very advanced baby.