Allergic to Penis

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At the tender age of two my daughter showed the first signs of a peanut allergy.  I thought I was being proactive when we taught her about this issue straightaway.  Within weeks she could recite, “I allergic to peanuts.  I no eat peanuts.”  This was a great start, I thought.

Shortly thereafter a friend’s infant son stayed with us for a matter of days while his usual babysitter was under the weather.  Naturally he required a nearly endless stream of fresh pants, sometimes as many as seven or eight a day.  Each time I laid him upon the floor for a diaper change  my daughter would toddle over to observe.

Each time her comments were precisely the same.  “Mommy, wassat?” she’d ask.

“That’s his penis,” I’d tell her. ” That’s how baby William goes pee.”  She’d look on, her tiny brow furrowed in concentration, then wander off to build with blocks or “nurse” her baby doll.

Then hours or minutes later noxious odors would once again waft up from baby William’s pants and the scene would be repeated.  “Mommy, wassat?”  Often she’d squat down and point at William’s diminutive organ, the first one of its type she’d ever had the opportunity to observe.

“That’s his penis,” I’d say.  “Pee comes out of his penis, just like pee comes out of your urethra.”  A puzzled look would cross her face, but busy as I was with small child and smaller baby I did not have the time to pursue her confusion any further.

On the last day of baby William’s visit we again initiated another diaper change.  “Wassat?” my daughter asked, her chubby finger inches away from William’s hip.

“It’s his penis,” I said.  Probably I said it with far less patience than on our first day with the baby.  Shouldn’t she know by now, I wondered?  Why in the world does she keep asking?

She continued to gaze at it.  “Is penis?” she asked.  “I no eat penis?”

I was stunned.  What in the world would make a two-year-old think of eating a penis?  Had she overhead something about oral sex?  Or seen something on the television?  I cast about for an appropriate interpretation of her question.

But the child was still pointing.  “I no eat penis?  I allergic?”  And suddenly it all made sense.  The poor child mixed up this astounding new piece of anatomy with the thing she’d so recently been told would instantly upon ingestion make her ill.  Of course she was concerned!  She’d wondered for nearly a week why in the world she’d want to eat baby William’s “peanut.”

I managed to clear up the confusion with some simple line drawings of the two similar-sounding items.  I did this despite the tiny voice in the back of my head which whispered that I should have allowed the child to believe indefinitely that she was indeed allergic to that marvelous yet sometimes dangerous organ.

–Submitted by Anonymous