ears, ears and unmentionables

My daughter taps the front of her nappy and proclaims ‘poo’ every time she breaks wind. Her rapidly developing language skills have coincided with a stage of anatomical awareness and her natural toddler curiousity causes her to point at everything and ask, ‘whatha?’ She is especially obsessed with body parts;  ears, eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, hair, nails, toes, nipples, bum.  A few weeks ago, she cut her knee at the beach. Until it healed, she pointed at the scabbed knee a hundred times a day and declared it, ‘knee.’
‘Clever girl,’ I praised her a hundred times a day, until the cut healed and she pointed to a scratched mosquito bite on her shin.
‘Knee,’ she told me confidently.

Over a month later I still hadn’t managed to correct her concept of knee, which made me very aware of how like a sponge she is, sucking up information to form a picture of the world, even if it isn’t entirely accurate. However, you can squeeze a sponge and it releases dirty water, I can’t do the same to my child’s brain to clear the murky misunderstandings from her consciousness.
So the other day I was changing her nappy when she stuck her finger into her vagina. I see nothing wrong with her explorations. This is something she’s done for ages and, since I want to raise my daughter with a healthy love of her body and no shame, I let her do her thing. That day, however, I was in a bit of a hurry.

‘Amber-Jane,’ I said, ‘take you finger out of your…’ I stopped. My mind raced through a plethora of options; pussy, fanny, puss-puss, cookie, wee wee.  They all seemed a little inane. None conveyed the ideas of love and respect I’m so keen on instilling.  Obviously, the more derogatory terminologies, like cunt and poes, were out of the question. I knew whatever word I used was going to stick, so I decided to do what I do with all major parenting decisions. Discuss it with my husband.

He almost fell out of the hammock laughing. ‘You’re so neurotic. Call it whatever comes to mind.’
‘What do you call it?’ I asked.
‘I call it her wee wee.’
‘But that’s confusing,’ I countered, thinking of knee, ‘We’re potty training and I call her pee wee wee. And it’s not very respectful.’
‘What do you want to me to call it?’
We started throwing out names, every term we could think of. Hamburger, box, snatch, growler, guava, poes, cunt, vag, koek, special place, down there, private parts, lady parts.
‘Why can’t we call it vagina?’ I asked.

Why is it so difficult for me to teach my daughter to say vagina? It’s not a dirty word. It’s not a swear word. It’s just a noun, the proper and correct term for referring to one’s, erm, lady parts. Why the stigma? Why do we think vagina is too explicit to roll off the tongue of a toddler?

‘Vagina’s a bit…’
‘What?’ I said, suddenly on the defensive, ‘Dirty? Sexual?’
‘Anatomical.’
‘And it’s rather an ugly word,’ I said, feeling deflated, ‘like papule.’

I’d love to know the origins of the word vagina. Who gave the pleasure and birthing centre of the feminine form such an angry name. VA-GY-NA! A name some ill-informed kindergarten teacher may scold my child for using.

The jury is still out as to what AJ will end up calling her VJ.
Yesterday she patted the front of her nappy.
‘Poo,’ she said.
‘That’s not a poo,’ I corrected, ‘that’s a fart.’
She thought about it a moment, then patted the front of her nappy again and declared, pretty emphatically, ‘art.’
Yes, I thought, it is.

* Some of the moms in our baby club think we shouldn’t teach AJ to say fart. J and I discussed this (see major parenting decisions) and decided it was better than flatulence or breaking wind, as in ‘Mama, I just broke wind.’