And also I hope that my 4-year old stops telling people about how our dog sometimes licks other dog’s pee-nuses at the dog park.

Bottom-cleaning is the one I find most difficult to deal with. It’s not so bad with boys but little girls really can’t have feces sitting around near their mucus membranes for too long; it’s tricky. The only thing worse for *me* is forcing infants to have medicine, in terms of the distress it can cause the child.

I try to give my daughter as much bodily autonomy as I can. For example, when she is resisting getting into her car seat, I sit beside her until she is ready to sit (instead of forcing her to sit, buckling her while she arches her back & yells.) But sometimes I don’t know how to manage that. The little boy I nanny for whom, when he has had a bowel movement, doesn’t want me to clean his bottom, & can’t do it himself either, for example.

I was raised very, very differently from this, and still learning, obviously.

I currently care for a 6-year old girl who had a few comments about some photographs of a lesbian couple. It led to a conversation about family. I thought her statement, “But they can’t make babies together,” was so funny and true and perfectly six, but also shows just how much she knows about people (and animals) reproduction and how comfortable she is talking about it.

I am so sad for the way sex is made into a shameful thing. When I was a child, curious about my body, my parents told me that we only touch our bodies in private, and it was fine. Then when I was 8, they became christians and began to make it into a shameful thing…something bad girls do, was the jist of it, really. So I struggled against this, feeling SO much guilt and shame, for years and years…ended up having sex far before I really wanted to, simply because I was bursting with curiosity, along with having many other really screwed up ideas about sex…then they refused to put me on birth control when I got up the nerve to ask, and instead proceeded to put me under lock and key for years, up until I was 20 years old and moved out of the house. I was having sex while I lived with them, but I was sneaking around and lying and feeling horrible about it constantly. I also denied that I was attracted to women as well as men, for years. I hate that I had (and still have a bit of) this guilt and shame associated with sex, and it seems so common, especially among those who grew up in religious households.

All of this was brought back to me in the most painful way recently, when a little girl I nanny for was touching herself, and her dad told in front of me, “Ladies don’t do that, honey. You need to stop.” It filled me with such revulsion and the memories of being a little girl and told much the same thing…I almost wept in these people’s living room. I must do things differently for my daughter.

Needless to say, this was a timely post, and I shared it on Facebook…although my conservative, puritan-minded family & old friends will not enjoy it, perhaps it will speak to someone else.

Thanks, as always, Arwyn, for the wonderful post.
-@karahugstrees