In our family, the car is the most likely place for incredibly complicated questions to be asked. This is probably because we live in the suburbs and spend more time than I like to think about driving around. Who can forget the "Mom, how do you use a condor [aka condom]?" debacle of 2009; or the "Sex can be just for fun, right?" crisis of 2010.
This weekend I had just dozed off in the car after a long day of bulk food shopping (don't worry, I wasn't doing the driving), when I was jolted awake by my innocent little son's voice lisping: "How do babies get made? Does the mom just decide to have the baby?" Now, you have to know that he is not prone to speaking in full sentences, and that 98% of his speech is committed to spouting random facts about baseball players. So you can appreciate my total discombobulation at hearing not one, but two sentences connected by a complex theme coming out of his little mouth.
I'm not going to sugarcoat what happened next: I panicked. I was able to get out the part about Mommy's egg, but then I launched into the worst kind of sexist euphemism about Daddy sprinkling the egg with magic. It was like Aristotle was just speaking right through me.
This is a long way of getting to my question for the Shake-Ball today: Will my son grow up to believe that he has superior magical powers and that women are nothing but passive matter? Have I taken the Women's Movement back 2,000 years?
Answer: "Hence with him to the Tower, let him not speak" (3HenryVI 4.7.57)
Interpretation: Hmm, interesting strategy, although a bit extreme. And possibly illegal. I think I'll just wait for him to ask about it again, and this time answer: Yes, Moms are the ones who decide.
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