Kid: I don’t even know what this song is saying. Womanizer? Is that it?

Me: Yes, it’s saying “womanizer.”

Brief silence during which I dread the next question.

Kid: What’s a womanizer?

Me: She’s singing about a man who dates different women at the same time.

Kid: Oh.

Me: Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, right? People can love more than one other person at the same time.

Kid: Right. I love all my friends. And my siblings.

Me: It’s only really a bad thing if you lie about it. Like if you try to make one person believe that they’re the only one you love when you’re actually seeing lots of different people.

Kid: Can you imagine if I told my brother and sister that? “XXXXXX, I only love you. I don’t love your brother.”

Me: That would be mean.

Kid: And wrong.

Me: Yeah.

Brief silence during which the music switches to something I want to explicate even less than the Britney Spears song. I decide to avoid the subject.

Me: You know there’s a name for loving more than one person at once.

Kid: What’s that?

Me: Polyamory.

Kid: I know what that means!

Me: Oh yeah?

Kid: Yeah, we discussed that in math class!

Me: *stunned*

Kid: “Poly” means many, right? Like polygon?

Me, relieved: Oh, right. And I bet you know what the suffix “amory” means, right?

Kid, perkily: Boyfriends?

————

Remember that my blogaversary is coming up on Saturday. I’ve gotten some really lovely entries for my contest and I’d love it if you’d toss one in as well. Up for grabs are gift cards worth $200 to Fascinations, so go to it!

Our test is crisis and observation.¹

I spent my twelfth year  in periodic pain so unmanageable that I begged my mother to puree canned vegetable soup as the thought of gumming through those already mushy chunks was too horrible to contemplate. Now my eldest is about to begin her own time in chains and I want nothing more than to find some way to make her not hurt.

Did you have braces? Do you remember the days following a tightening? I do; my teeth swam freely in my jaw, unmoored from bone and screaming at the gentlest pressure. I walked down the hall and they rattled. I sat still and felt each friend’s footstep as an individual throb. I spoke and the wind exiting my throat yanked them painfully hither and yon.

How she will handle this I do not know for she is anything but a stoic child. If my youngest has the unreasonable daring of a Johnny Knoxville and my middle an heiress’s fashion sense (and dislike of undergarments), their sister possesses the attitude of the most overindulgent actor, running through every variety of dramatic machination forty-seven times before breakfast is even set on the table. Today’s insertion of rubber-band spacers prompted much extreme agony so I can only imagine what tomorrow’s banding and next month’s installation of the full compliment of metal will bring.

We’ve prepared her as much as we can. She’s reading this book and we’ve discussed pain management techniques from the medicinal to the physiological to the philosophical. Classical mythology is her passion right now; I reminded her of Sisyphus watching his rock fall again and again. I set her to reading about the gom jabbar² and it’s just possible that the first hint of understanding that pain is both utterly transitory and at the same time all-consuming is beginning to dawn on her. We’ll see.

I’d wear the braces for her if I could, but that would defeat the purpose of growing up, which is to be broken upon stronger and stronger opponents until you cannot be broken by anything.

1. Many thanks to Marnanel for locating this for me at the drop of a hat. [↩]
2. The selection I pulled out for her contained the word “damn,” which she primly altered it to “darn” in the desktop notepad while I pondered the possibility that she’d been switched at birth [↩]