High Maintenance Mom

I consider myself an open person. I'm outgoing and generally happy to talk about almost anything with people I've just met. There are, however, many conversations I don't want to have with my children. I'm sure that some of them are unavoidable, but I am trying hard to delay them. The one I have recently had to work to avoid has been menstruation. I'm pretty sure that I didn't learn about it when I was three...

We are open about using the bathroom partly because I have a slightly better chance of hearing what the kids are doing if I don't close the door and partly because we want to help the kids want to become independent bathroom users (it's worked so far for our oldest). So now that I'm getting my period again, I find myself trying to keep the kids away when I use the bathroom. It's just not something I want to explain to a three year-old who has no sense of when to ask questions. It's also not as easy to keep them out of the bathroom as I had hoped. Somehow, our bathroom has turned into a playroom. One child will come in talking about something and then the other will drag in a toy and soon it feels like the bathroom is the only room in the house. I'm reasonably sure that once we have the conversation, we'll be having it everywhere - in the car, at school, at the supermarket, and so on.

Other topics I'm not ready to discuss include why people break the law, the adult bookstores we pass on El Camino, and why people beg for money on the street. Little did I realize that reading "The Wind in the Willows" was going to bring up questions about breaking the law. It turns out that I had remembered very little of the book. There's a rat, a mole, a toad, and a badger, it sounded reasonable to me. What I had forgotten was that it was written a long time ago for a slightly older audience. It also contains words that I don't know and really long sentences so I'm not recommending it for this age group.

When B was six months old I only wanted happy books for him. The ducks would go out to play but they'd be back at home safe with their mommy at the end of the book. I quickly realized that I would need to read books that were a little more challenging to help B understand the real world. Peter Rabbit goes out, gets into trouble, makes it home, but his family is a little unhappy with him. From there it was only a matter of time before we took the next step. In our case it was to a Toad who goes out and breaks the law. First he totals six of his own cars. But now Toad has stolen a car and gets sent to jail. I've been answering questions about jail and why he stole the car for the past two days.

B: Mommy, what's jail?
Me: It's a cage where people who have broken the law go.
B: Do they sleep there?
Me: Yes. On old smelly mattresses. (I can already feel that I've lost this one)
B: Why?
Me: Because they don't buy new mattresses very often. You have a new mattress. (trying to change the subject)
B: Does jail protect you from animals?
Me: Umm, what kind of animals? (trying harder to change the subject)
B: Sharks and whale sharks.
Me: Sharks and whale sharks live in the water.
B: Oceans, and lakes, and ponds. What color is Clarence?
Me: I don't know, what color is Clarence? (guessing that he is now talking about Thomas the Tank Engine)
B: I don't remember. Mommy, what's a jail?
Me: It's a place that people go when they've broken the law or haven't followed the rules. Did you go for a walk today? (hoping to again change the subject)
B: Look there's a car going backwards.
Me: Oh, that's not a good idea (a car is going backwards down the other side of the street as if to say, "you will talk more about rules and why we follow them").
B: That's not good. Someone could get hurt. Why are they doing that?
Me: I really don't know.
B: Maybe they don't know the rules.
Me: I think they know the rules. (thinking to myself, now where am I going... do I really want my three year-old to start telling me that he knows the rules but is choosing not to follow them. It begins to feel like my car is going in the wrong direction.) Maybe they, well sometimes people know the rules but choose not to follow them (hoping the conversation ends but knowing that we are going to have this discussion a lot). It's up to us to choose to follow the rules so everyone can be safe.
B: Mommy, what's jail?

Although I have not had to discuss menstruation today, I did end up having six conversations about jail. I'm hoping that tomorrow we can go back to discussing how whale sharks can be bigger than buses or whether a whale likes to eat jellyfishes.