I will regret that I ever decided to circumcise him in the first place. I will wish I could undo that decision and give him back today, and the summer he'll spend in bed.

I was 23 then. I was a smart 23-year-old with a circumcised husband and a circumcised father who told me I’d better not “let my sons go through life wearing a turtleneck.” Which is I guess how he describes penises with foreskin. It wasn’t that I wanted to circumcise my kids. I cried from outside the room they wouldn’t let me in. It’s just that’s what we did then. This was when people were still saying, “Don’t you want him to look like his dad?”

I guess the risk of bleeding, pain, irritation, inflammation, and injury wasn’t enough to make me question the decision to circumcise my boys. But the risk of having to sit in a hospital while my teenage son is alone in an OR, undergoing a surgery he never would have needed had I left his penis alone, would have been.