Hole Going Nowhere
That is a Belly Button!
I remember when my middle daughter, Bethany, was four, she loved to draw pictures of our family. We were usually all standing side by side out in the yard in front of the house.
There was always Daddy, Mommy, Bethany, her two sisters, the house, flowers growing beside us, and a tree with huge apples and they could be any color: red, purple, or even blue.
The people were always stick figures of varying sizes, Daddy as the largest, down to Heather, the youngest. What seemed odd, or out of the ordinary to me, was that each stick figure always had a large circle right in their middle. Daddy’s circle always had little lines coming out from it all the way around.
I told Bethany that I always love seeing her pictures and I asked if she would share what the circles were. Looking a bit exasperated, she said, “Momm-eee, can’t you see? Those are the belly buttons. They only look like a hole, but they aren’t really, ’cause holes are s’posed to go somewhere and belly buttons don’t.”
(oh gee … my bad)
“Why does Daddy’s belly button look different?”
“Momm-eeee, ‘cause Daddy’s belly button has hair in it.”
(uh oh … I should have seen that coming)
Anyway, that’s where the inspiration for this little children’s poem came from. Beth inspired it with her drawings.
Belly Buttons
Belly buttons look so funny.
Some have lots of hair.
Some are in, some are out …
just a hole that goes nowhere.
Too cute! 🩷
A delightful story and poem.
During the Renaissance there apparently was controversy surrounding the problem of Christ's belly button in religious art. Sine Jesus was supposed to have been a virgin birth from a woman who was virgo intacta, should the messiah have been portrayed with or without a belly button. An incorrect portrayal could have been construed as heresy, which might have rendered the artist kindling for a great ecclesiastical weenie roast.
Similar concerns arose about the penis of the lord and the fate of the divine prepuce. The recent invention of the telescope lead to the discovery of Saturn's rings. The seventeenth century Vatican scholar, Leo Allatius, studied the problem, and with great discretionn and perspicuity, declared that the rings of Saturn were in fact previously unobserved prepuce of the baby Jesus.