“The Seck”

“The Seck”

Parents and families have all sorts of weird names for their genitalia. Sometimes these monikers come about organically based on the funny way a child pronounced “vagina” or “testicle.” Sometimes parents are too uncomfortable with the scientific names for body parts and succumb to “pee pee.” A friend of a friend’s family called vaginas “va-jizzles,” which honestly does not seem different or cute enough to warrant its own word. When my cousin was little he noticed his testicles looked like a flying squirrel. But my favorite epithet was invented by the daughter of my best friend. After staring at her mother for a while she asked “Mommy, why do you have a hairy front-butt?”…

I had trouble with the word for underarm when I was young – I tended to conflate armpit and underarm. I sometimes still call it my “under pit”…

When my family visited Italy I had just learned that boys and girls had different parts. I was fascinated by the mechanics of what my 3-year-old brother could do. We were staying in a beautiful old villa. On the top floor I discovered several small, round, and very low windows. What else could they be for, I wondered? I made my brother pee out these tiny windows on several occasions until my mother discovered it. To this day I have no idea what these small windows could be…

Recently while discussing the role of the sperm and the egg with my 6-year-old — science he has been aware of since I was pregnant with his younger brother – my son asked me “but HOW does the sperm get to the egg? How does the daddy get it in the mommy?” Now, I don’t believe we need to tiptoe around issues of biology with our children and I was prepared for this question. I answered as simply and honestly as I could. There was a long silence. I thought maybe I had been wrong, maybe this traumatized my poor, innocent boy. Finally he said “Can astronauts have ‘the seck’ in outer space?”