I really hadn’t planned to talk about reproduction with Meg for quite a while yet. I guess I should have anticipated that knowing she had a birthmother and a foster mother before we became her parents would spark some questions like, “What exactly makes someone a birth parent, exactly, if “birth parent” does not refer to the people who are actually parenting her?”
At some point the topic of skin color came up and Meg heard that it came from your parents. Since this obviously didn’t mesh with her experience, I had told her that it came from her birth mother and father.
The fact that babies grew in a woman’s tummy, sometimes the mommy’s and sometimes the birthmother’s, had been addressed earlier, in the same way we had addressed it with her brother, which I describe in a previous blog. So we had used the same phrasing with Meg. Although at first I was reluctant to muddy the waters with talk of another mother (even though I freely admitted that that’s what the birth mother and foster mother were) and referred to “the lady whose tummy you grew in” and then to that lady’s first name, which I knew, eventually the term birthmother had become familiar to her and more comfortable to me.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised that now, at eight, she wanted to know just what her link was to her birth father and just how her birth father and birth mother had come to create her. But I still felt unprepared, flummoxed even. I put her off once by saying I’d look for a book that I remembered seeing on the subject.
I told her that a part from a man and a part from a woman had to join together. I told her the names of the parts, she asked how they joined, and I told her. Like many kids, she was somewhat grossed out. I told her it wasn’t gross when a man and woman married, but it was only for then.
Fast-forward a few weeks. Here in the Northwest, the salmon really are king. The schools do a big unit on the salmon returning from the ocean to spawn, laying their eggs in their own home stream.
Applying her newfound knowledge, but obviously feeling that the explanation of the pieces and their joining that she had received wouldn’t work with what she knew of fish bodies, Meg asked me how the “stuff” from the dad salmon got to the eggs of the mom salmon. I explained that with fish, the female lays her eggs first, and then the male comes along and sprays them, so the mom and dad don’t have to be there at the same time.
I knew she was still a bit grossed out by the whole human reproduction scenario when she replied seriously,
“I think I’d rather be a fish.”
—If you think I was flustered by and exhausted after these conversations (and I was), wait until you hear the next major discussion! I’ll share that one in my next blog.