The Time My Baby Thought My Sex Toy Was A Phone

It doesn’t get any more mortifying than this.

Everyone knows that nightstand drawers are sacrosanct. They’re for your unmentionables. I don’t mean panties; I mean things you need next to the bed for a reason. Ok, fine: They’re for sex stuff.

Nightstand drawers are for condoms, lube, handcuffs, clothespins or whatever else the ladies are inspired to purchase in the era of Fifty Shades of Grey. (I haven’t read it—am I missing something? Jumper cables, maybe?) Anyway, those drawers are also home to many a woman’s best friend: her vibrator.

I’m not shy about the fact that I have a vibrator or two.

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For a while, I fashioned myself something of a Vibrator Fairy. For my sister’s 21st birthday, I sent her a care package full of fun things including, yup, a vibrator. The saleswoman at Toyland, an institution on the Lower East Side, recommended a non-threatening introduction piece, which is why my sister celebrated adulthood with a buzzing, pink, plastic little bear.

I even mailed a vibrator overseas once! After college, my best friend flew to South Korea to teach English. She went by herself, didn’t speak Korean, and didn’t think she’d have any potential suitors for a while. So I did what any good girlfriend does—I went vibrator shopping! I sent her the funniest, yet still usable, thing I could find: a small, vibrating, hot pink dildo named “Jelly Jr.” She was thrilled with her new boyfriend, er, toy. She joked about taking him out for drinks or buying him a jaunty little hat. I’m pretty sure that had Instagram been invented then, Jelly Jr would have had his own account, littered with pictures of him posing at tourist sites and taking selfies in bars.

That’s generally how I approach sex and sex accoutrements: laughing.

Sex is fun. Sex is funny. These kinds of things don’t generally don’t embarrass me. Until something not merely embarrassing, but outright wrong happened. Something that didn’t just break down the barrier separating Mom Jen and Person Jen, but stomped all over it.

I’m a stay-at-home mom. While my 5-year-old son goes to school, my 18-month-old son is home with me all day, everyday. He’s my shadow. Wherever I go, he goes. One morning when I was finally getting around to brushing my teeth, my son wandered out of the bathroom and into my bedroom.

Right now he’s in a phase where the only thing he likes better than shutting things is opening them. First he headed to my dresser to open and shut drawers. Then he moved on, shuffling to my nightstand. I was halfway paying attention to him when I begin plucking my eyebrows. I saw him open the drawer and reach in, poking around with his pudgy fingers. I didn’t think he’d find what I buried in the back. I was wrong.

He pulled his hand out, clutching my lavender vibrator. Shocked, I barely registered what he had before he put it to his ear and, with a smile, started saying, “Hell-o. Hell-o.”

And that, my friends, was the day my baby answered my vibrator.

This piece originally appeared on Your Tango.