CARNAL NATION

"Have you got two balls? Yes, you do! Two balls! One in each hand! What nice balls!" croons my friend Constance to her son, sniggering only silently, and probably again while transcribing her monologue for me.
 
"Can you show me your balls?" ask parents everywhere, brightly. "Do you have a red ball? Do you have a blue ball? Do you have bouncy balls? Bouncy, bouncy balls!"

The balls! The balls balls balls balls balls balls balls! By this past winter I was so balled-out that while re-sorting the kids' toys into bright new boxes, I labeled the crate full of spherical things "BOUNCE" instead. I just couldn't face looking at BALLS all day, even spelled out in spongy, bouncy, primary-colored stick-on letters. BALLS BALLS BALLS.

BALLS aren't the only kid things capable of inspiring this odd mix of sniggery amusement and discomfort, of course. If you're going to be around young kids, it's going to be a constant. It has to be—children's toys, books, songs—hell, even children themselves—are consistently, insistently suggestive, yet acknowledging the squicky, not-so-submerged subtext of something like "I love little pussy" makes you feel like a pervert.

It takes a combination of willpower and massively repeated exposure to finally beat the Beavis and Butthead out of otherwise adult adults who started off their parenting careers giggling at all the pussies and balls. And sometimes not even that.

I remember "I love little pussy" from my own childhood, and I swear I was reluctant to say it out loud even before I'd consciously encountered the word's other meaning. There was just something that made me feel all Wayne's World gym class rope-climby about it, and I didn't want anything to do with it. Likewise Little Jack Horner's thumb-in-pie, which doesn't even correspond all that closely to anything perverty, and yet manages to sound completely puerile in a way that bothered me, again, before I'd ever developed conscious awareness of other things you can stick your digits in and then crow "What a good boy am I!"

It just sounded... wrong.

Nowadays I'm less alarmed by little Jack (although I still shun that pussy) and amused by stuff like "Hop on Pop"  (a phrase that has sprung to mind more than once, entirely inappropriately) or "Would you, could you, with a goat?" And who could resist the good-natured reciprocity of this alien sex act from Fox in Socks: "Ben bends Bim's broom, Bim bends Ben's broom." Bend away, boys!

I have friends who cannot bear the name "Pooh," or find it so hilarious they can barely read the stories. Me, I'm good with "Pooh"  (although I wouldn't have been so tolerant if someone had given my kids the overalls my friend Jane's son had, the ones with "Here comes Pooh!" and an arrow on the butt), but now that we're looking Pooh-ward, I'm wondering about that "Hundred Acre Wood." And I hear there's a Disney attraction called "Pooh's Playful Spot." Oh, the playful spot? I've totally taught classes on how to find that thing!

The more you know about the weird things people get up to, the more suggestive kid stuff (and everything else) gets. You know those people who have inserted themselves deep and hard (sorry) into Pervert World and now feel the need to remind you how perverted they are at regular intervals? They start to sound a little like Eric Idle in the "Does she go?" sketch, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, and they can't be trusted to look at a clothespin or a ping pong paddle without nudging you painfully (and, come to think of it, non-consensually) in the ribs.  You don't ever want to catch yourself sounding like those people. As much as one tries not be tiresome, though, it's hard not to snigger or at least lift an eyebrow at "play date" (I recently scandalized a childless pervert friend by mentioning that a mutual acquaintance and I used to have these before her son went to preschool) or pony boy/girl gear for the kindergarten set, like this or these. And I think I was hunting for the latter when I turned up an entire genre of YA fiction with titles indistinguishable from those on the BDSM free stories sites.

Catching these things and exchanging a snicker or a muttered "Would you, could you, in a sling?" can be just another bonding moment, a way to reassert the fact that even in your harried, desexed, child-centric household, some people are grown-ups. My husband Kenton and I still get an unwholesome but entirely harmless kick out of Bert and Ernie's obvious longtime companion status. For instance, although he reminds me that the "playing with balls" page in that little book we used to read does not, in fact, go: "Ernie can pitch. Bert can catch." It says "throw," probably on purpose, but I stubbornly continue to remember it my way.

Keeping your adult eyes on makes the constant re-readings and re-watchings bearable, although my furry-monster-puppet appreciation circuits may have been permanently damaged by too much exposure to Margaret Cho's immortal line, "I got fisted once. I felt like a Muppet."

Come to think of it, we snicker over regular puppets too, ever since reading years ago about puppet-loving Plushies. To this day, I have difficulty inserting my own extremity into a puppet's "hand-hole" without thinking of the people who would think of it less as a place to put your hand and more as an orifice.

We know these things. We're going to notice them; it's unavoidable. And we're, sometimes, going to come across some big blue balls or a kid dressed up as a pony and look over at our partners for conspiratorial confirmation: "You saw that too?" What we are not going to do, not if we are nice boys and girls, is make a big deal out of it, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, or allow the fact that we can read this stuff on two levels simultaneously to catapult us so far into Ironic Distance Land that we cannot enjoy innocent kid culture for what it is. That is the way of the alternaparents littering the internet with sniggery, snickery blog posts that apparently exist solely to prove that their authors are too cool to be parents. Which is great, just don't be one then.