When Meg was six, she asked abruptly one day, “Who is my father?”
My second-grade son immediately launched into a lecture. Having just studied synonyms in school, he pompously explained to her that Dad was her father because the word “dad” was a synonym for “father”.
After he left the room, I smiled at Meg. “That wasn’t quite what you meant, was it?”
She shook her head, brows furrowed. “You mean your birth father?” She nodded, and we shared a smile over her brilliant big brother not getting it for once.
I told Meg her birth father’s first name and that he worked in a factory. (I did not tell her his last name, because we have a large Korean community in the city and a few Korean last names are often held by a large portion of the population. I thought it would feel awkward if every time she met someone by that last name, she was wondering if it could be her birth father.) Neither did I speak of his relationship with her mother. I mentioned her birth father’s religion, which was the same as ours. I told her of a hobby of her birth father’s which was listed on his paperwork, and noted that her dad also shares that hobby. (I wanted to end by referring to her dad and myself, to subtly remind her that we were also her “real parents”.) I also reminded Meg that her name contained my middle name as well as her birth mother’s middle name.
Meg seemed to accept all this. Neither of my kids quite understood what role a father played in a birth anyway. (That babies grew in a mother’s or birth mother’s tummy, they already understood. I share how we addressed that topic in this blog.)
When my son had asked, at a precocious age two, how babies were made, I told him, “by a mommy and a daddy and God all working together”. That satisfied him enough to buy us several years. Once he mused in front of my husband, “Mom said the dad helped make a baby. But how?” He then veered off on a tangent (my son has been known to lecture to himself for over forty minutes) and never returned to the question of the father’s role for another couple of years.
The next time he brought the subject up, he was eight. I was driving alone on the interstate with all three kids jammed together in their car seats in the back of the small car. Suddenly the toddler vomited, which wouldn’t have been so bad if the kindergartener hadn’t begun screaming hysterically. I don’t know if she was grossed out, or afraid Regina was really sick, or what.
There was no place to pull over. I was rummaging with one hand in the diaper bag on the front passenger seat for a towel or cloth diaper when I heard a slow, serious little voice. My son, apparently oblivious to the fact that the child right next to him was covered in vomit and that his other sister had been screaming bloody murder for several minutes, asked,
“So, how does the baby get INTO the mommy’s tummy, anyway?”
I know experts advise answering children’s questions calmly and naturally so that they will feel comfortable asking us for information instead of their peers. But I think my response to Patrick at that precise moment may have scared him off asking forever.