Like Corn
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One of the best things about being Noli Jo's mom is watching her discover, over and over, that she has a body. Actually, the first time it was horrifying, but ever since then it's been delightful.
The days after her birth are a foggy jumble--physical and emotional exhilaration and exhaustion sutured together in a throbbing line across my lower abdomen, all of it stewed together with regular doses of narcotics. But I will never forget the afternoon during her first week outside of my body when I held her as she screamed. She had been doing this for hours, inconsolable and unable to sleep, as I panicked, simultaneously thinking that I could not do this, and that if I could not do this, surely we would both be dead soon. I pulled her away from my chest and looked at her face, crying and saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know what to do."
And then I looked into her eyes.
She was looking straight at me, and yet she wasn't. (Infant eye movements are not coordinated, and they can only, barely, focus on things about eight inches away.) At first her eyes seemed like those of a blackout drunk person--technically alert, but in reality, nobody's home. Then I saw what was shooting out of the depths of her black pupils, from the back of her crimson throat, and every cell of her clenched, rigor mortis-like body: Terror. It was unmistakable.
Here she was, a person in a brand new body that had been violently pulled into the world, being called by an unfamiliar name. Suddenly she was being asked to sleep, wake, eat, be manhandled, snapped in and out of dumb clothes, held, bounced, and laid down. I realized that she was even more afraid and unsure of this whole mess than I was, that she had even less of an idea of what the fuck to do.
In that moment, I understood one clear duty as her mother: To guide her as she learned her body. To give her parts names, and support her as she puts them to use.
Her neck, which became strong as she grew from a squishy, amorphous skin bag into a baby who could lift her head. Her legs and feet, which she discovered while laying on her back--kicking them up, grabbing her toes, instantaneously making it clear why that yoga pose is called "happy baby." We celebrated crawling and walking, of course, but saved the loud, riotous freaking out for when she realized that she could use her legs to run.
Her belly, which is somewhat flat when she wakes up every morning, begins ballooning outward as she wolfs down breakfast. It stays this way all day, and she ends every meal and snack with the same words: "More please." When she sees a particularly tasty bit of food heading her way--a banana, meat on a bone, corn on the cob, warm toast with butter and jam--her tongue darts in and out of her mouth excitedly, and she runs it over her lips loudly. Each of her loud burps and farts is proudly announced after the fact, with a grin.
She has tolerated and come to accept my mammalian insistence on grooming--triumphantly declaring "earwax" when I pull an orange-tipped pinky out of her ear. At the end of the day, after we take off her socks, she brings each foot to her nose to sniff and asks me to clean out (and let her smell, as my heart bursts with pride!) the sticky, sour mixture of dead skin and lint between her toes.
Her body is beautiful, we tell her, and she loves to move it. She dances everywhere; her current favorite song is "Yakety Yak" by the Coasters. ("Don't talk back," she bellows in a newly discovered lower register of her voice. ) She ends everyday lying in the darkness of her room, sucking her thumb.
But none of these pleasures is quite like the one she alone gives herself multiple times a day. As soon as her diaper comes off, her hand shoots down to her crotch, feeling around. She's been doing this since well before she was a year old.
"That's your vagina," Will and I told her. "You can touch it."
As a young girl, I was not told to touch my vagina. In fact I was specifically ordered not to touch my "pekadoodee" (WTF MOM), while also being regularly reminded to clean it vigorously. Noli calls her arm her arm, her neck her neck, her hair her hair, and so I am determined that she will call her vagina her vagina. It is what it is, after all, and it is all hers.
"Nono touch 'nina," she tells me every time, as if I need an explanation.
This isn't nebulous crotch groping that she's doing. Most of the time she takes her pointer finger and drives it straight upward toward a target: her clitoris. She finds it, hidden under the fleshy hood where her tiny labia meet, then rubs, pokes, and tickles it. It makes her laugh.
"She does nothing practical at all with her clitoris," wrote Natalie Angier in her book Woman: An Intimate Geography. "The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That's a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else on the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice the number in the penis."
It's no wonder it only took Noli a few months to discover it.
According to Merriam Webster, the clitoris is "a female sexual organ that is small, sensitive, and located on the outside of the body in front of the opening of the vagina." The Oxford English Dictionary defines it similarly. But it turns out that on matters of the clit, two of our most widely used reference books are wrong. (Are you as surprised as I am?)
The glans of the clitoris, the only external part of the organ, is indeed small and sensitive. It's what most people of think of as the clit, but that's because it's the only part of the clitoris that we can actually see. The rest of it--and there is a lot more--lies inside. The are also the crura, two legs that are each up to 10 centimeters long. They extend downward, surrounding the vagina on either side. Vestibular bulbs also flank the vagina; they are bundles of erectile tissue that, during arousal, swell and stimulate the area. (Even though the crura are technically the legs, I like to picture them as a pair of chaps worn over the meaty thighs of the vestibular bulbs.) So the clitoris isn't a wee thing hovering above the vagina; it's actually a dynamic entity that holds it in a devoted embrace.
It's also the only organ in the human body built solely for pleasure.
In Angier's words, the clitoris is "so pure of purpose that it needn't moonlight as a secretory or excretory device. For this reason maybe it's best that the clitoris normally is hidden within the vulval cleft: it is, in its way, a private joke, a divine secret, a Pandora's box packed not with sorrow but with laughter."
Noli is two now, and she's been keeping up the casual clitoral diddling faithfully. When she seems to be picking at it the way she picks her nose, I reminder her to be gentle. But otherwise I refuse to get in her way. I figure she's entitled to whatever good feelings she and her young body can give themselves. I've been watching her do this nearly all of her life. It's obvious that the urge is instinctual and brings happiness. I'm more concerned about why it occasionally makes me uncomfortable. After all, I watch--and applaud--as she gleefully contorts, wriggles, stretches, and flings every other part of her body around each day.
A few months ago, I asked her what it feels like when she touches her vagina. She looked at me with her twinkling gray eyes and answered immediately, clearly, confidently: "Like corn."
Corn!
What could this possibly mean? Did she misunderstand me? Did she just happen to be thinking about lunch when I asked?
I asked her again a few days later, then a few days after that. I've asked ten or so times over the last couple of months. The answer is always the same: "Like corn." She delivers it with a knowing smile that also seems to convey the sweetness of it. (Needless to say, she is a voracious corn eater.)
I was texting with a friend about "the sweetest kernel," as Will and I now call it, and she was amazed that Noli knew what her clitoris was.
"Dude I couldn't find my vagina until I was 15."
"And someone else found my clit for me when I was 14."
"God, knowing about it earlier and integrating that knowledge into my first sexual experiences would have saved me a lot of pain."
While reading her messages, suddenly I remember the time when I was a kid lying on my family's couch under a blanket, watching television with a bag of salt and vinegar chips on my chest. I had my hand down my pants and was fumbling around, giving myself the warm fuzzies. My dad came in, saw me, and told me to stop. "You don't touch yourself there," he said before disappearing out of the room. I was around ten, barely knew what sex was, and certainly didn't know what a clitoris or an orgasm was. All I knew was that it felt good--and that that day I was scared enough to not put a hand down there until, a few years later, someone else did.
In Woman, Angier writes that there are three possible evolutionary explanations for the clitoris. It's a vestigial penis, a vestigial clitoris (some evolutionary biologists posit that back in the day a woman used sex--and a much larger clitoris--"as the universal key...to curry friendships, placate tempers, to solicit meat or favor from any number of partners," and that it's been shrinking ever since), or perhaps something else entirely: a constant adaptation.
"It is essential, or at least strongly recommended," wrote Angier. "It is also versatile, generous, demanding, profound, easy, and enduring. It is a chameleon, capable of changing its meaning to suit prevailing circumstances."
The current circumstances of Noli's everyday life are innocence, fun, exploration, a developing sense of self. I have no idea who exactly she'll become, but whoever that person is, I want her to know her body. To trust and enjoy it. Sex will surely come (soon enough, as I have become frighteningly aware by reading Peggy Orenstein's Girls & Sex). Eventually we'll teach her the words vulva, labia, clitoris. But for now she has a simple, perfect pleasure. Like corn.
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