Salon.com > Katherine Ozment

Mommy, what’s a vagina?

Tue, 05 May 2009 10:20:00 +0000

Our 6-year-old son, William, and 3-year-old daughter, Jessie, have been taking baths together ever since she graduated from her daily dip in the kitchen sink. About a year ago, in a stunt deemed normal by most parenting manuals, she up and reached for her brother's member, which had been floating beneath the surface of the water like a mystery to be unraveled.

And then she did it again. And again.

These frequent incursions would send William into a tizzy of giggling, squirming and (he'll kill me one day for writing this) positioning himself so she would do it again. Coming off the tail end of the evening witching hour, I would be sitting on the floor at the threshold of the bathroom -- one ear aimed to the room across the hall where "Hardball" blared from the TV, the other in the direction of my kids -- when I'd note a peculiar tone to their laughter. It would sound higher pitched and more joyful than normal.

"What's going on?" I'd yell, summoning my inner Archie Bunker, knowing full well what was going on.

"Jessie's grabbing my penis!" William would yell back, snort-laughing as water splashed around the tub.

So long, Chris Matthews.

The family jeans

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:57:00 +0000

Most mothers have a certain look in mind for their children, and mine for my 1-year-old daughter, Jessie, is of a stylish tomboy. Which is why last winter, I ordered her a pair of bluejeans with front pocket flaps, embroidered designs and a slight flare at the ankle.

On the first day she was to wear them, I dressed her as I always do -- hoisting up the jeans over her dimpled thighs and edging them over her diaper. But when I went to close them, the zipper wouldn't budge. Unlike Jessie's other pants, the jeans did not expand to accommodate her melon-size belly. It was an image I'd seen before: the uncloseable zipper of jeans I wear only at my thinnest, that unbridgeable gap in the pants we dub our "skinny jeans."

I encountered my first skinny jeans in high school. Under the tutelage of my best friend, Hazel, who had the bone structure of a gazelle, I bought a pair of Levi's 505s and tapered them to fit like a second skin. They were so tight at the ankle that I could barely take them off. But they looked good, and, wearing them to parties, I started to get noticed by boys. Home at night, I'd wiggle out of them by hopping around my room on either foot until I collapsed on my bed to peel them off. Only then would I see the long, red imprints of the tapered seam running down each leg. I'd put on my pajamas and revel in the reclaimed ability to breathe. Those jeans were my first encounter with the potential pleasure, power -- and pain -- of fashion.

Nursing my fears

Tue, 07 Oct 2003 14:57:00 +0000

When I was growing up we had a milk box on our front porch. It was made of aluminum and insulated with white plastic. Every week four tall, rectangular bottles of milk would appear in the box. They would always come early enough in the morning that no one in my family saw who brought them. I remember how you could almost tell when the box was full. It seemed more solid, like a filled-up cube, and the lid didn't make such a hollow sound when you opened it. The bottles grounded it, kept it from floating off into the yard and down the street. Years later, after my father moved out, my two older brothers started riding motorcycles and smoking pot, and my mother was buying milk at the store on her way home from work, the box remained on the front porch, empty and unused. Sometimes the lid would blow open in the wind. Sometimes dried leaves would gather in the bottom of it.

Our son is hungriest at 3 a.m. and it's then that his tiny mouth takes to my breast like a piston. His body lies across my lap, the only movements his jaw and throat, the only sounds his gulping and panting, like he can never get enough. I try to imagine him all grown up. I think: Someday you'll be 6-foot-2 like your dad and you'll tell me to leave you alone, and I'll want to tell you about these nights. I'll want to say: While the whole world slept, I fed you with my body.