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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
My 2-year-old son didn't know what the word meant, but he knew it shocked the adults around him.
Jul 6, 2004 | Just before Christmas, my 2-year-old son, London, started saying the word "pussy." As the father of two, I understand that new words stick to 2- and 3-year-olds like toilet paper to the bottom of your shoe, yet this ideogramic discovery struck me as different from the others.
The first time London uttered the word, we were sitting at the dinner table -- me, my wife, the boy and his 7-year-old sister, Poppy. London had just declared that he was finished with his meal and, not restricted by the rules of eating that the rest of us subscribe to, he began to run around the room, holding a Thomas the Tank Engine figure in the sticky tunnel of his closed hand. "Pussy!" he yelled, Thomas above his head, weighting his fist like a roll of pennies.
My wife and I looked back at him in unison, not dropping our forks, but definitely halting the chew. "What did he say?" she mouthed at me, careful not to alert our daughter that this word had some thorns.
"Hey, London," I called as casually as I could. "What did you say?" I forced a phony smile to throw him off the scent.
"Pussy." He cocked his head. He waited.
"You see a cat somewhere?"
"No."
"What's a pussy?"
He searched around the room, trying to find an object to attach to the two syllables. My wife is a folk artist and there were many objects among our many collections for him to choose from -- bottle-cap men, ceramic cars from Mexico, strings of red chile lights. He spun around and then pointed at me. "You!" he said gleefully. "You are a pussy!"
I suppose, in retrospect, we paid far too much attention to an otherwise harmless word that I'm sure would have faded, like all the other sounds my son gives voice to during any given week. "Pussy," however, captivated us. I'm a writer and high school teacher, so the music of the word alone grabbed me, not to mention its myriad meanings. (I'd recently purchased a meat mallet, and couldn't stop using the term -- saying it at home, in my classroom, in my car: Where is my meat mallet? Who stole my meat mallet? Have you met my meat mallet?) For my wife, it was her love for all things taboo. A 2-year-old with that word in his mouth was deliciously naughty. Because we gave London the third degree over this one term, he soon realized its power and said it even more frequently than I mentioned my new flesh hammer.
A former student of mine, who is now in college, visited us one afternoon to tell us of her upcoming trip to the town of Hana on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The road to Hana is famous for its twists, turns, waterfalls, and potential for carsickness. Since we had experienced this firsthand during a vacation the summer before, we spoke of Hana in great and nauseating detail. London darted in and out of the living room during our chat and then sidled up to my student, the Thomas figure now replaced by Buzz Lightyear, and asked her, "Hana pussy?"
My student tried to be polite and asked London to repeat himself -- which he did, but now with a more affirmative statement: "Hana pussy. Yes, Hana pussy."
She sized us up and asked sincerely, "You guys watch a lot of porn around here?"
