"Why does Pac-Man have a penis?": My uncomfortable conversation with my 8 year old

Like most boys, when I was a kid I was obsessed with boobs and all I wanted was to actually see a real picture of them.   I remember the first time my dream came true, it wasn’t romantic but it was magical nonetheless.  My great Uncle was doing some renovation on an old house and my grandparents dropped by to see how it was going.  I was about 7 or 8 and while they were talking with my great Uncle, I was walking around the house checking out all the construction and noticed two pictures taped to the wall from a distance.  It was unlike anything I had ever seen, I saw that each picture had a different woman in it and from where I was standing it seemed as if they were lacking clothes.  I quickly took a look around to make sure no one was watching and I ran over to get a closer look.  And like a vision in a dream, I saw that my intuitions were correct:  Not only was there one naked lady posted on the wall but there were two.  I stood there in all of my childish awe and picked my jaw up from the floor.  It was everything a young 8 year old boy dreamed of.  I was amazed at how much different the naked ladies looked than I did and was puzzled as to what the patch of hair was down below and what the heck it was for.  “How the heck do they pee?” was my first thought after getting over the initial shock and awe of the whole thing.  Ahh, but my dream was quickly dashed when my grandmother walked around the corner and found me staring at the wall with my mouth twisted in an unrelenting, confused smile.  “Oh no, get away from there, Dustin!!” she said and quickly grabbed my hand and yanked me away.  I overheard her fussing at her brother and asking him why those pictures were there and his reason and logic seemed reasonable to me.  “Motivation” he said and laughed.  I was told to forget about the things I had seen but it was forever burned into my young psyche (hell, look its 22 years later and I still remember it like it was yesterday).  When I went back to school shortly thereafter, I wanted to put my new found knowledge to paper so I drew a series of crudely, disproportionate pictures of faceless naked ladies on the back of my work.  I didn’t totally think my actions through.  It didn’t occur to me that my teacher might just turn the papers over and see my little attempts at art.  My teacher never said anything to me directly but she did make sure to make a phone call to my mom and sent the pictures home with circles around each offensive image.   It devastated/shocked/disgusted my mom and she explained that I was to never do something like that again.

I say all this because recently the tradition of artistic expression was passed down to my middle child.  A couple of weeks ago I was going through my son’s book bag like a good dad and came across his composition book.  I wasn’t really going to look at it until I noticed the title that he gave the book, “My Mean Teacher” by Kyler Elliott.  My curiosity was tweaked and I opened it up thinking I would see the young rantings of a child complaining about the unfairness of math and spelling.  (He had been telling me a lot lately that his teacher was not fair with math because she kept changing the answers and I had been consistently telling him that math is absolute and answers couldn’t be changed.  He didn’t care about that and insisted that she made up her own math that was contradictory to his own.)  But there were no rants or complaints, but there were a lot of drawings in the first couple of pages.  Most of it was normal kid stuff, dragons and storm troopers, but in the middle of it all was a weird, unmistakable drawing of a naked woman.  I laughed (to myself of course, because I couldn’t let him know that I thought it was kind of funny) and then put on my stern parent face and asked him about it.  Kyler turned about 14 shades of red and initially claimed that he didn’t know what the picture was.  “I dunno, it’s just a person” he said.  “Really?  You have no idea what you’ve drawn?  It just came to you in a vision, huh?  Dude, we both know what this is.”  I said.  He shyly admitted it and I told him that I was going to tear it out of the book, not to do it again, and that I wouldn’t tell his mom.  He looked relieved but I noticed he was still a little hesitant, like maybe he still had something else to say but he didn’t and I put the notebook away.  I did tell my wife but told her that I handled it and not to say anything to him, he was just being a boy and he wouldn’t do it again.

Well fast-forward two weeks to yesterday, my wife was looking for one of her notebooks and I was helping her and I saw a composition book.  I had forgotten that I had put the book up and I picked it up and ruffled through it.  I realized that it wasn’t hers when I saw all the other scribbles in the book but I saw something in the very back that I didn’t see before.  “Holy shit!” I said and my wife came over to see what I was going on about.  The whole backpage was filled with an assortment of drawings of penises.  There were two standalone penises, a picture of a circular smiling figure with a penis, a little man with a huge penis, and a naked lady with a penis.  “Oh my God, is that Pac Man with a dick?” I said.  It immediately reminded me of Jonah Hill in “Superbad” with all of his various drawings of penises.  “Oh God, what do we do?  Why the hell is he drawing all of these penises?  And why does the woman have a dick?!?” my wife asked me like I had some sort of answer.  I tried to come up with a logical answer and told her that perhaps he was just being creative.  (In all reality I didn’t and still don’t have an answer.) 

So we decided that we couldn’t sweep it under the rug and we had to have the “talk” with him.  I promise that there is nothing more uncomfortable than explaining to sex to your kid.  This is one of the parts of parenthood that I would rather pass on to someone else.  When he got home we showed him what we found and asked for a simple explanation.  He said, “I dunno, they’re just a bunch of doodles.” 
“No”, I thought, “they are a bunch of dicks” but I refrained from saying it out loud.  My wife, being a little more brave than me, told him fine and asked him to explain each picture.  She went through each one and each time he replied with exactly what we thought originally.  It was indeed Pac-Man with a penis and the lady was actually a ladyboy.  We went through and explained anatomy, biology, and why he couldn’t draw this type of stuff at his young age but then came the big question.  My wife asked how he even knew what boobs looked like.  He told us that he had seen a painting of a nude woman in the museum when he went to Boston.  “Okay, fine but why did you draw her with a penis?” she asked.  “Well, the painting only showed the top half of her.  I don’t know what the rest of a naked woman looks like.”

Ahh, the joys of parenthood.