penis check « Letters from Grenada

penis check

It started about two years ago when Bean first figured out that neither his grandmother nor I have a penis. He was AMAZED.

For a while afterward, he’d randomly point at one of us and say, “No penis?” He’d ask me. Then his grandmother. And his babysitter if she happened to be there. Once we had all admitted that we did not have a penis, he’d point at himself and proudly declare, “I have penis!”

Anyhoo. He forgot about that for a while. I guess the novelty wore off. Every once in a while, though, I hear him say something like,

“Grandma? You’re weren’t even BORN with a penis? Are you sure?” The subtext there, I guess, being that perhaps once upon a time she had one but then she was naughty and it got confiscated.

Sometimes he tells me that girls don’t have penises. You know. In case I forgot. What’s truly precious about that is that he says it so very gently while looking right in my eyes, as if he’s trying to soften the blow of the news.

There’s no punchline to this story.