Fragements of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 5

“You don’t know who you are anymore!” We’ve just finished eating lunch and my grandmother is sitting across from me at her dining room table. “All your traveling, your reading, exploring other cultures,” she purses her lips and looks down. Then she tilts her head ever so slightly to the right and nods a couple of times, a gesture that usually means she’s looking for a nicer way to say what she really wants to say. After a few seconds, she raises her face to me but can barely meet my eyes. “You’ve forgotten where you come from,” she says at last, her voice more sad than accusing.

I know what this is about—I told her last week that my wife and I have decided not to have our son circumcised—but I ask anyway. She knows I know, and I hear in her voice when she answers how much she resents my making her say it. Oddly, though, she does not try to make me feel guilty about denying my Jewish heritage or about marrying a non-Jewish woman. Instead, she says, “You’re only asking for trouble, you know. When he gets older he’s going to want to know why he’s not like you; he’s going to think you don’t want him to be like you; and what are you going to tell him when he asks you? Have you thought about that? What are you going to tell him?”

My two-and-a-half-year-old son, who’s been sitting without his diaper on the carpet in the living room, gets up and sits down next to me on the couch. “Dad,” he says, “my dool is soft.”

“Well, it’s supposed to be soft,” I tell him.

“No, it’s soft,” he says, his intonation making clear that I didn’t understand him the first time.

“You don’t like it when it’s soft?” I ask, waiting to see what he does with the opening I’ve given him.

“No,” he answers without missing a beat, “I want it to be big…like yours.”

“Don’t worry,” I say, “when you get bigger, your dool will get bigger to. Right now, it’s the just right size for—

Before I can finish my sentence—“for your body”—my son looks up at me, his eyes widening and his mouth curling into a smile. “Dad,” he says, “come see my tools!”—my son is a budding handyman—“I need to fix the refrigerator!” And as if the previous conversation had not taken place, he grabs my hand and leads me off to his room, where we retrieve his plastic hammer and screwdriver so he can make sure the refrigerator continues to keep our food cold.

As we’re walking, I laugh at myself, for I of course saw in my son’s desire for a penis as a big as mine a small moment of crisis, a foreshadowing of all the ways in which he will try to measure up to me and find himself wanting. Yet who knows what he really meant by what he said? And even assuming he meant exactly what he said, who knows what significance, precisely, he attaches to the notion of big or what he thinks it says about me that my penis is bigger than his, or about him that his is smaller? I remember how the other day when were watching television, my son made a point of laying on his side in as close an approximation to my posture as he could achieve and how he insisted that I notice him, “Dad! Look! I’m sitting just like you are!” Or how he takes his laptop-like alphabet-teaching-computer-game and sets it up so he can sit like I sit at my computer and type. More and more he wants to be like me, to do the things I do, and so it could be that his comment about his penis had nothing to do with any of the phallic anxiety I could not help but hear in his words. Maybe he was just acknowledging that while he can sit or type like I do, he cannot bring his body into congruence with mine.

My grandmother’s question and accusation comes back to me—What will you tell him when he asks why he’s not circumcised and you are? He’s going to think you didn’t want him to be like you!—and I wonder not so much what I will tell him, but whether I will ever be able to know precisely what he means by asking.

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2 Responses to Fragements of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 5

  1. 1
    Ben David says:

    Many situations like this in Israel – although the circumcision status is usually reversed. I am often included in these stories because I am the only Orthodox Jew in the office, or some such connection.

    Lotta circumcised little kids with uncircumcised Soviet/foreign fathers. Lotta kids and teens undergoing circumcision for various reasons. And at least two fathers seeking circumcision to resemble their sons!

    Very important not to give the kid too much information.

    Your baggage (about being Jewish, circumcision, etc.) counts as “too much information”. You owe it to your child to figure this stuff out on your time, and present him with a relatively stable worldview on these issues.

    As you point out in the story above, your kid may be coming from a completely different angle, and therefore there is no need for long dissertations. Try these:

    “When I was a baby they thought it was healthy to cut this part off. Now they don’t think so.”

    Yes, devoid of Judaism – but it works for 90 percent of assimilated American Jews for whom this is a cultural, not religious, issue.

    “Grandpa and Grandma gave me a bris when I was little because they do a lot of traditional (Jewish) stuff (give concrete examples from the child’s experience of things Grandma and Grandpa do that we don’t). But we don’t do that stuff anymore, and we left your dool alone.”

    I love that knickname by the way! Here in Israel kids that age call it a bulbul.

  2. 2
    tanya debuff says:

    This is my first visit to this site, and I’m going to be back! What a great post. I am dealing with a 6 year old daughter who last night asked me, after a discussion about when she was in my belly, how babies get in there. I hedged, avoided, but decided I needed to answer this question, but how? Finally I said “Babies get in there when a girl and a boy have sex.” I wasn’t ready for that to springboard a discussion of the mechanics of sex, and thankfully it didn’t, she just said “Gross!” and I tried to explain that it wasn’t gross…anyway, this made me think about that more and also realize I need to be prepared for these questions!