Sugar in My Bowl (14 page)

The Diddler

J. A. K. Andres

I
t’s an idyllic, cloudless afternoon when Callie’s kindergarten teacher blindsides me. She points at my daughter, hard at work at a pint-size desk. Callie’s so focused on tracing a map of Australia she hasn’t noticed I’ve arrived.

“She’s been doing that all day,” her teacher says.

“Doing what?”

“The squirming,” she whispers.

Callie’s perched on the very corner of her seat, wriggling away.

Oh, shit,
I think.

I’ve seen plenty of diddlers. Little boys’ hands wander down their shorts at restaurants, little girls rub against the fire pole on the playground. Their mothers yank them back to reality with a hiss: “Don’t
do
that!”

I’ve been lucky. My older children, both boys, weren’t diddlers. Now my third, my only daughter, might be having a personal relationship with a chair.

On the walk home we stop at a park and the baby crawls on the grass while Callie swings on the monkey bars. She doesn’t seem interested in the fire pole.

Then she reaches under her skirt and squeezes her Hello Kitty undies.

“Callie, why are you doing that?”

“This?” She grabs her undies again. “It feels funny.”

I hope she means funny as in itchy, not funny as in tingly. Then guilt rushes through me. Do I really wish my daughter were rashy rather than diddly?

“Well, just don’t do that in public. Please.”

At home, after I nurse the baby and switch up the laundry and marinate some chicken for dinner, I tell Callie I have to check her vagina. “I just need to see what it looks like.”

“Oh, Mom,” says Callie, a hint of disdain in her voice. “I already know what it looks like.”

“You do?”

“It looks like boneless chicken breast.”

So much for Georgia O’Keeffe’s orchids.

And while I do convince Callie to show me her vagina, if I get too close she bursts out giggling.

“That tickles!” she gasps, slamming her thighs shut.

Callie’s labia looks irritated. Perhaps it was red before she got friendly with her chair. I grab some diaper rash cream from the baby’s room.

Writhing hysteria ensues. “Mom! Stop!” She’s laughing so hard she’s practically crying. I suggest Callie apply the ointment herself and leave her alone.

There’s laundry to fold, the baby won’t go down for a nap, my mother-in-law calls. The boys get home from school and require lumberjack-size snacks. An hour’s gone by since I left Callie in her room with the ointment.

I peek in. Callie’s bare-assed, in a full straddle, bent over her vagina with a limberness Nadia Comaneci would envy.

“Callie?”

“Mom! Look! You gotta see this!”

I step around her outstretched toes. She’s got her clitoris in her fingertips and is giving it a twirl.

“Oh, my,” is all I can say.

“Isn’t this cool? It feels great! You should try it!”

At breakfast the next morning, Callie announces her vagina has a name.

“It’s called Cho Cho.”

One of her brothers spews milk all over his toast. The other is politely interested.

“Cho Cho? That’s a weird name. Our first baseman calls his wiener Big Frank.”

The baby just gurgles, a noise not unlike the one my husband makes in his throat as he glares at me over his coffee.

Days later, in a rare moment alone with my husband, I attempt to work out how Callie went from detachedly describing her vagina in meat counter terms to naming it, like a pet.

“Newtonian elation,” I conclude. Finding her clitoris is to Callie what discovering gravity must have felt like to Isaac Newton.

He sighs. “Is she young for this? I mean, when did you start?”

I try to remember when I realized my vagina had a purpose beyond excretion, but no “Aha!” moment comes to mind. It was there, it was nice, but it didn’t rate a nickname. These days I think of my vagina as the place my four kids came from, just as my breasts are udders dressed up in a brassiere.

Somewhere between that forgotten moment of discovery and my evolution into a vessel of motherhood, I progressed from “hurry up before my roommate comes back” dorm sex to first-apartment all-nighters to indulgent B&B weekends. Now it’s solely marital-bed sex, which is a lot like hurry-up dorm sex on high-thread-count sheets. Did all that emanate from kindergarten diddling?

My husband grows bored with my slack-jawed lack of response.

“Forget I asked. How do we get her to stop?”

“Stop?” That hadn’t occurred to me. “I told her it’s OK to play with her Cho Cho—in private. Not in front of other people, not even me.”

“And not in school!”

“Of course! But, honey, I don’t want her getting a hang-up about it. It’s not
bad
.”

“I know it’s not bad,” he says. “But is it normal?”

“In theory.” But this isn’t theory. It’s our six-year-old daughter.

He turns to the computer.

“Are you Googling it?” I ask. “When girls start masturbating?”

“No,” he says. “I’m going to craigslist. To search for a chastity belt.”

Soon, Callie’s Cho Cho is part of the family.

In the tub: “Callie, wash behind your ears, under your arms, and don’t forget your Cho Cho.”

At bedtime: “I wanna go commando tonight, Mom. Cho Cho needs to air out.”

Watching me change the baby’s diaper: “Poor baby has a wiener, not a Cho.”

One afternoon, the boys yell through the house, “Hey, Mom! Make Callie put some clothes on! Our friends are coming over and we don’t want them seeing her Cho Cho!”

I yell back, a bit too shrill, “Callie! Put your Cho Cho away! Now!”

She’s dressed before the friends arrive, to my relief. But I also feel something akin to grief. Is this the beginning of the end of Callie’s innocence?

Callie’s always run around naked and carefree like a wood nymph. At six, she’s in love with herself in a way she never will be again. She doesn’t have long before she starts comparing herself to other girls, before she wants to wear a bra instead of nothing at all. I’d like her to stay naked and carefree as long as possible.

But when our house is teeming with eight- and ten-year-old boys, Callie the Wood Nymph seems more like Callie the Exhibitionist. It’s unfair to restrain her youthful exuberance so her brother’s friends don’t get an eyeful, but the bottom line is: I don’t want boys to see my daughter naked.

Now that Callie’s found her Cho Cho, she’s busted out of Eden with a vengeance. Her nakedness is now tinged with a hint of what’s to come. Unlike Eve, Callie’s thrilled with her new knowledge. How ’bout them apples, Serpent?

In a way that feels like spying, I spy. I check in with Callie’s teacher; there’s been no more squirming. Apparently the wooden chair was a one-night stand.

When Callie has a friend over and I notice her door’s closed, I just happen to have an armload of her laundry to put away. Her stuffed animals are spread over the floor and they’re playing Jungle Vet. Not Doctor, not Naked Jungle Vet. G-rated Jungle Vet.

It seems Callie’s heeding my directions about privacy. She’s not a Public Diddler.

But Callie still makes time to play with her Cho Cho alone. One night when Callie loiters in the tub, I vent to my husband.

“She’s at it again. The water’s cold and she won’t get out.”

“Just pull the plug.”

“Honey, this is a balancing act. If we somehow give Callie the message to lock up her Cho until she’s got a ring on her clitoris-twirling finger, she could end up repressed. Or, worse, she rebels and turns into the neighborhood tramp.”

“Or we keep doing what we’re doing, and she ends up fine.”

I sigh. “I just so don’t want to screw her up.”

With as much gusto as a universal remote allows, he snaps off the TV.

“Look, I’m not thrilled about this Cho Cho thing either. But there’s nothing wrong with Callie—”

“You’re the one who said she’s young to start diddling—”

“Well, she’s started, so now we live with it. She doesn’t in public, right?”

“Right, but—”

“—Stop! You’re a good mother. A great mother. Quit overthinking; you’ll get a handle on this.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“You’re sure?”

He flicks SportsCenter back on. The daily highlights have just started. He offers me a swig of his beer, and I take a long, cold swallow.

“I have absolute faith in you.” He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively. “Wanna see my Top Ten Plays of the Day?” He presses his cool, hopsy lips against mine. I lean into the kiss.

A shriek erupts from the bathroom.

“Mom-meeeeee!” It’s Callie. “The water’s freezing and I need a towel!”

My mother never worried about this stuff. In fact, she welcomed it. “I missed the sexual revolution,” she announced countless times, “by one year. One measly year!” She’s still bitter.

She encouraged me to tell her before I decided to “do it,” so she could get me a diaphragm. She asked embarrassing questions about how much I knew, or didn’t know, about anatomy. She commented on my menstrual cycles and my boobs, as if discussing the weather. “Your breasts are filling out, full and high. Why don’t we shop for a B cup this weekend?”

She was so open and encouraging that I completely tuned her out.

When I was twelve, she overheard me and a girlfriend wondering whether a man could pee inside a woman when they were having sex. Mom hauled books off the shelf: wordy, illustrated books, books with photographs, books with indices, for god’s sake. She kept us captive for the longest twenty minutes of my life, explaining in detail why it was almost—but not entirely—impossible for an erect penis to urinate.

For some reason that girl never came back to my house. And I never asked my mom about sex. Who had that much time?

Since I want Callie to be comfortable talking to me about her body, I reject my mother’s ultrainformative approach, which achieved the opposite effect with me. Neither can I blow it off as a normal milestone, despite my husband’s absolute faith. How to achieve this delicate balance?

I consider my husband’s advice to stop overthinking Callie’s diddling. It isn’t as if sex is on Callie’s radar screen; she’s only just discovered her Cho Cho. And, like Isaac Newton and gravity, she didn’t really discover it, she just named something that had always been there.

I decide to take underthinking a step further and pretend there’s nothing going on between Callie and her Cho Cho. To hell with delicate balance. Problems always go away when you ignore them, right?

After a week of intentional denial, the stars align for me and my husband to attempt marital-bed sex. We’re both in bed and awake at the same time; the baby’s in between feedings; no one’s having nightmares or needs a glass of water; we both have the energy and desire.

We’re getting right down to business when I catch myself generating a mental grocery list instead of an orgasm. I push my husband away.

“What’s wrong?”

He asked for it. “I suddenly remembered that burned-out lightbulb in the hall. Which made me think about going to the hardware store. But what else do we need at the hardware store? A new lock for our bedroom door. Because any minute one of our kids will come bursting in on us and you’ll have to pretend you’re getting something out of my eye again. That made me think of how we skip foreplay and rush through sex all the time, and here we are finally doing it, and I’m thinking about lightbulbs.”

He strokes my shoulder. “I’ll fix the lock this weekend.”

“It’s not about the lock!”

“Shh!”

I hiss, “Down that dark hall, Callie’s Cho Cho is waking up, and mine’s in a coma.”

He stares at me. “That’s messed up,” he says. “You sound . . . jealous.”

“No! It’s just, she’s got all this fun ahead of her, and I’m—we’re—” I can’t say out loud,
we’re stuck in rushed marital-bed sex mode
. I’ve already spoiled the moment.

Ignoring the issue isn’t working. I’m back to seeking a delicate balance.

I don’t feel like asking any of my friends or neighbors, “Hey, does your daughter diddle? Just wondering, ’cuz Callie’s discovered her vagina and named it. Your daughter does that too, right?”

The Internet yields erratic results. “Most females begin masturbating at the onset of puberty,” offers one dubious site. “And some never masturbate at all.” Many more sites are blocked by our parental controls.

Maybe there’s something helpful in one of those books my mother tried to press upon me. I pop into the neighborhood bookstore, but nothing in the parenting section appeals. As I breeze toward the exit, a title stops me in my tracks:
The Vagina Monologues,
by Eve Ensler.

That night I read
The Vagina Monologues
in one sitting. Then I read it again. Holy crap! There are women in weeping, joyous love with their vaginas, women who purposely disown their vaginas, singing vaginas, bad-luck vaginas, mythical vaginas. And so many names! There’s “Itsy Bitsy,” “fannyboo,” and in one heartbreaking monologue, “coochi snorcher.”

Compared to “coochi snorcher,” “Cho Cho” sounds tame.

I kick myself for missing
The Vagina Monologues
on stage (couldn’t get a sitter). Ensler transforms a word most people won’t even say out loud into several distinct voices. Maybe if I initiate a discussion with Callie, starring Cho Cho in a nonsexual role, I’ll nail that delicate balance.

It’s time for a vagina dialogue with my daughter.

I need somewhere quiet and private to take this baby step with Callie. No such place exists in our home. It has to be the car.

I glance in the rearview mirror. Callie’s contentedly watching the world slide past.

“Callie, if your vagina could wear clothes, what would it wear?”

When she stops laughing she answers straight-faced.

“Underwear, of course.”

“And if your vagina could say two words, what would it say?”

“It would say, ‘Gotta pee!’ ”

Of course. “One last question, Callie. Wait—do you really have to pee?”

“No, I was just answering the question.”

“OK. The last question is, what does your vagina smell like?”