The Butt Goes In The Back

We passed a threshold tonight.

Tonight, as is the biweekly custom in Castle TwoBusy, we bathed the offspring. They are grubby little creatures, and over the course of several days of digging in the dirt, slathering on sunscreen and feasting on freshly-slaughtered baby seals (family business), they begin to accrue a second skin perhaps even more thick and durable than their own natural epidermis. In keeping with one of the tenets of our social contract with America, we occasionally plunge them into hot, bubbly water to scrape away the debris and reveal, following excruciatingly careful paleontologic cleansing, the bright, shining and wondrous cherubim beneath.

Tonight, as we were in the midst of this meticulous process, with three growing young mammals sharing a single deep tub festooned with great cumulonimbi of honeysuckle-perfumed churn and froth, the time came to begin delivering them one by one from the water, at once halving and reversing Noah's grand dream of rescue. My son volunteered for the first position, to free himself of this unwelcome baptism and return to the more secular pleasures of iTunes on his mother's laptop. He stood tall - so very tall, long and lean and limber, all sinew and pliable bone - and as I began to pour a bowlful of water over his soapy shoulders and glistening frame, his sister Butterfly lifted her hand and pointed. "(TheHurricane) has a penis!" she exclaimed.

My eyes rolled back in my head, and I died. "A penis!" she said. "Boys have a penis, and girls have a vagina." Her voice was strong and clear: definitive with truth. There was no room for doubt. Her twin, Rabbit, sat inches away, rapt with attention, her eyes huge and wide and infinitely blue beneath a gossamer veil of bubbles. "Vagina," she said quietly, saying the word as if learning the secret name of God. "Rabbit," Butterfly continued. "Girls have a vagina. Boys have a penis. See?" And then she reached forward, as if to grab the...

My head exploded. "OKAYOKAYOKAYTHAT'SENOUGHOUTOFTHEDAMNEDTUB" and in an instant, a heartbeat, an eyeblink deus ex machina moment I wrapped the unwary Hurricane in a plush green towel and lifted him up, up and away from this octopus' garden of eden.

Knowledge, that first bite of the apple, had come to my full bath. The blind and gorgeous indifference of early childhood had abruptly gone belly-up and floated to the surface, like an overfed goldfish savoring that last bite and then blinking, blinded, beneath the purity and intensity of that sudden white light. Go toward the light, little fish. May your currents be swift and strong.

As I furiously scrubbed my son down, toweling his hair into a towering inferno of tangled brown and spiky twists, he no doubt felt somewhat baffled by the sudden nature of his departure from the warmth and comfort of tub time. There had been no joking, no smiling, no "silly guy!" exclamations... just the powerful grip of inevitability grasping him firmly by the shoulders and pulling into something brusque and uncomfortable. He looked at me with pleading eyes, trying to reason what he'd done wrong. "It's okay, buddy. We just need to get your PJs on."

Meanwhile, Butterfly continued her dissertation. She stood to her full height, commanding the attention of the crowd. "The penis is in front, and the butt goes in the back." She gestured and shimmied, adding an unnerving accent of body English to a display that quickly sent her sister into paroxysms of gut-busting laughter. (Granted: she is an easy audience.)

The dissertation rapidly devolved into impromptu song: "Penis inna front, butt inna back... penis inna front, butt inna back..." replete with Travolta-quality tub twisting. As TheHurricane quickly dressed and fled, Rabbit howled and giggled, her cries echoing off the dark tile, bouncing from one wall to the next and reverberating into a near-tangible cloud of glimmering preschool hysteria.

The Butterfly was lost in song. In the midst of it, she turned and looked at me, her smile broad and knowing. And there beneath her feet, 'neath a quickly vanishing patina of bubbles and gallons of water, through layers of acrylic and mazes of whirlpool plumbing, we found my grave. She danced on it with glee.