What Your Kids Don’t Know About Zorro

I’ve always been more apt to talk about sex in a joke than talk about it for real, and that goes double for talking with my parents.  I’m not sure at what point it seemed OK and not incredibly embarrassing to even joke about it.  Sometimes it’s still embarrassing now.  My wife likes to recall that when she first met my Dad, they were watching TV and a Viagra commercial came on.  She felt a little awkward to start with, but when the ad’s narrator warned, “See your doctor if the erection lasts longer than 4 hours,” and my Dad said something like, “Why would someone want an erection for 4 hours?” Amy had no answer but to wonder desperately why I wasn’t in the room and why I was taking so long.

Now that I’m writing this, Amy reminds me of an even better one.  When Amy and I were first dating, I lived in a loft apartment with a simple futon mattress on the floor.  When we moved in together, we ditched the futon mattress and used Amy’s tiny creaky iron bed.  One day, my Dad and Amy were talking, and my Dad wanted to know, “How’d you get him into a bed?”  Amy was speechless as usual.  “No, no!” said my Dad.  “I know how…oh, never mind!”

It’s twice as bad with my kids as with my parents, though.  It is just not a topic that I can casually joke about at this point, though our teen daughters are 16 now, so I try to steer clear of it.

But when our family was together one night playing a word game, including Amy and me and my parents and my daughter T, I got ambitious and decided to try and tell a joke to my daughter.  My Mom had previously emailed the joke to Amy, and they were talking about how funny it was, so I thought it would be pretty harmless to try and relate it to T, since I could imagine her liking the punchline a lot.  “You really want to tell that joke?” Amy asked.  “It’s not really dirty or anything,” I reasoned.  Amy was skeptical, “It’s a little dirty.”  I honestly somehow forgot that most of the joke was about sex until I started telling it.  The following is my censored, butchered version.

“So these three women are sitting around talking about their men and their love lives and whether they’re happy with them, and they decide to…uh…spice things up, you know.”

“One is dating, one is having an affair, and one is married.  They all agree to wear…uh…a black…sexy outfit…and…shoes…and then meet back and discuss how it went.”

“They meet back and ask the one who’s dating how it went.”

“‘Great,’ she says, “I put on…that outfit…and we…had a really great time…uh…all night.”’

“Then they ask the one who’s having an affair how it went.”

“‘Well, I wore that outfit underneath a…uh…coat…and I surprised him at his office and we uh…did it there and…it was great.'”

There is mercifully only one part left to the joke, and I am relieved the end is in sight.

“So then they ask the one who’s married.  She says, ‘I got all dressed up just like we said, in a black mask and, you know, um, bra and heels, to greet him at the door when he came home from work, and he came in and saw me.'”

“‘Yeah?  What did he do then?’ they asked her.”

“‘He just said, “What’s for dinner, Zorro?'”

See, all I remembered was the punchline, and look what I had to go through to get to it.

“I know you’ve heard way worse than that, T,” I told her.

“Yeah, you’re really overprotective.”

“I’m protecting me!  You know how embarrassing that was!  God!”

Friends, not food

From the way Em and Soso react to visitors coming to our front door, you’d think Amy and I should socialize more.  The girls are fascinated by why people want to talk to us, and will thoroughly question us about anyone who comes by or calls.

Amy and I were talking, and I was relating something my friend Raj from work had said about his own young kids, who are a few years older than Em and Soso.  “Who were you talking about?” Em asked.  “Oh, Raj.”  “Raj?”  “Yes.”  “Is he your friend?”  “Yeah, I work with him.  He has two little kids just like we have two little kids, though they’re older than you.”  “I want to see them.”  “Oh, maybe we could do that sometime.”  Our conversation was interrupted by the house phone ringing.  Em was immediately excited: “Is it Raj?”  “Um, no, it’s a telemarketer.”

The confusion and wonder multiplies when we actually have more than one person come to the house on the same night.  There’s a family pizza place nearby that delivers, and is our go-to place when we are out of food to cook and creative ideas about where to eat.  It was Friday night and we’d decided to call in an order.  That same weekend, my friend David was going out of town and had asked us to feed their cats, and I’d told him he could drop off their house key any time that night.  I think I was just explaining to Em and Soso what we were having for dinner when David pulled in our driveway and came up to the front door.  “My friend David’s here, he has to give me something.”  “David’s here?” Em asked.  “Yeah, he’s my friend, I work with him, he’s got two cats that I’m going to look after.”  Em craned her neck to see out the front door window.  “Does he have the pizza??”

Ordering out is obviously a recurring theme in the household.  This past week Amy had asked a few landscapers to come to our house and give us estimates on some work.  They scheduled various morning appointments, and one morning around 9 there was a knock at the front door, which Amy ran off to answer.  Em immediately checked with me what was going on.  “Is it the pizza guy???”  She’s going to give people the impression we call in pizza for breakfast, which just doesn’t seem fair with all the nice meals we cook.  Maybe we’ll try inviting people over for a nice dinner more often, and Em and Soso will get more used to people coming and going at our house.

Ask, Daddy

Em and Soso are masters of a thousand voices.  Baby voices, cat voices, monster voices, shrill opera voices, and inexplicable raspy gravelly Linda Blair Exorcist voices.  Em in particular had a habit a few weeks back of talking half the time in her devil-possessed Exorcist voice: “Daaaaaddyyyyyy!”  Hearing a low, menacing tone coming out of that sweet cutie pie face really does seem supernatural and make you wonder whether there might be something to possession, and it’s especially eerie when it’s your own name.  “Thank you, daddy,” she would rasp, and the more she did it, the more Amy and I would crack up, which of course eggs her on.

I should also mention that Amy and I frequently call each other a pain in the ass when exasperated, but not too exasperated to use an insult affectionately.  “Oh, you’re a pain in my ass, hon.”

Obviously you can never say anything without expecting to hear it repeated back to you by your children.  But you don’t always expect how it will mutate in their heads or that it will sound like Linda Blair saying it, or that they’ll say it to you.  So one night at dinner I’m teasing Em about something.  Nothing serious, something like “Oh, Em doesn’t need any dessert.”  Em laughs and searches for the right words and finally ventures, “You’re a pain in the ask, Daddyyyyyyyyy!”  You could have heard a pin drop while Amy and I struggled not to laugh, and I had to leave the room and she had to put her hands over her face to cover up our huge smiles.  That’s the opposite of not reacting, but we are really bad about that.  It’s a miracle she is not walking around saying “ass” all day.  Or “ask”.

But then Soso will take some of the attention away by walking up to each of us at the dinner table and saying, “Do you want to hear my oink?”  “Sure,” one of us will say.  Soso closes her eyes, stretches out her arms in front of her, bows forward to exhale a large breath, and then sucks in a great big oinking noseful of air that makes her head vibrate: “ONNNNNNNGGGGGHHHKKKKKK!”  So we can stop laughing at the word “ass” and laugh at something less crude.  Pig sounds.  They know their audience, and they have our sense of humor down pat.

Rules 6 through 4

Every couple days one of the kids will be eating her meal and get a funny look on her face.  “Say ‘daddy’!” Amy and I demand, freaking out a little.  “Daddy!”  They’re still talking, they’re not choking, everything is fine despite the momentary panic.  This is enough of a routine that they say it to each other.  “Em, say ‘Soso’!” “Soso!” “There, you better.”

Tonight it was a real emergency, Em couldn’t say “Mommy”, she had a green bean stuck in her throat.  We’re turning her upside down, slapping her on the back, fishing around in her mouth, and eventually she spits out green beans.  And then some other bits from her meal.  And then some pieces of lunch, and then some of what you can’t tell what it is anymore.  Em’s covered herself in barf, all while on Amy’s lap, and included some of Amy’s lap in the spray.  She’s not choking anymore, so everything’s fine.  Still, Soso is freaking out and her stomach begins to heave.  Amy looks at her pants and covers her mouth, gagging.  We are on the verge of a puke-a-palooza, as Amy said later.  We cleaned up fast and managed to keep everybody else from being sick.

While Amy’s getting cleaned up, Em is busy making a sign on the fridge.  “No choking,” she explains.

A few minutes later, Em and Soso are busy trying to use their rocking horse to reach a wastebasket on our desk.  Em elaborates on her sign, listing a series of rules for her and her sister.

“Six.  Don’t choke your sister.”

“Oh.  Don’t waste the power of the world.”

“Four. Don’t get your hiney up there.  Don’t get the trash bin!”

I’m not sure where she learned the word “hiney”, I don’t think Amy and I have ever said that.  I might not be quoting her 100% accurately.  But I do know she won’t choke her sister.