The Talk....so not ready

Recently, when 3 year old Ernie asked how little boys were made, I smiled. First, because the innocence of this question is grand.  Second, it happened while daddy was bathing him and I could enjoy my spectator safety from another room.  I was impressed when Andy evaded details of how boys and girls are "made".   And yet somehow,  he delivered a factual answer to a contented Ernie. 

Earlier in the evening,  after contemplating the freshly pounded and still raw hamburger patties:
Ernie:  How do hamburgers get made?
My failed attempt at artful dodge:  Daddy made them.  Don't you remember?
Ernie without skipping a beat, counters:  But where do the red parts come from?
Andy to the rescue:  They come from a factory, where big machines grind meat into little pieces.

(Factories with big machines are a standard and accurate answer to about 45% of the daily questions.)

I refused meat for more than half of my life or would make myself sick after eating it. While I feel OK about potential  body conversations, I dread the talk of meat.  When is a person ready for that? 

I want to  encourage this pure eagerness to know and to understand the world.  And the topic of meat is more menacing than death (related to old age or sickness).  What was and maybe is still scary for me is that there are people who butcher animals and make their blood come out and then we eat them.  My feelings and objections to being at the top of the food chain are irrational and I am intent on masking this particular hangup of mine for our boys.

I hesitated to indicate that birds eat worms and that spiders eat flies.  I suffer a heaviness over what will be a first roadkill sighting.  I have difficulty pulling my eyes from roadkill, as if I need to verify the species  or approximate cause of death...or maybe I fear that if I look away, I am pretending it didn't happen, dismissing it.  The  damage of having been raised by highly intellectual pretenders prohibits my looking the other way or offering a cool and detached explanation.
And why do I recall more clearly than anything else about Sarah Palin, the image of her, at the turkey farm smiling obliviously for the camera?   Directly behind her, a turkey was being stuffed face first into that funnel/saw headwhacker machine.
PS~I do eat meat and wear leather.  So, no judgment for meat eaters or animal skin wearers.