Writer's Workshop: Let's Talk About Sex, Baby!

For this week's Mama Kat's Pretty Much World Famous Writer's Workshop, I chose the promt: "Sex education! How old were you when you learned about the birds and the bees? Who taught you? Describe that experience."


I can't remember if it was before or after my third sibling was born. So sometime between the ages of 7 and 10 (we had sex ed at school in Fifth Grade, when I was ten. My baby sister was born roughly a month before my tenth birthday, and there was only a month of school left after my birthday, so unless sex ed was crammed in at the end, I probably was younger.)


At some point, in the car, alone with my mom, I asked her "the question." Now, was it "Where do babies come from?" or "How are babies made?" I couldn't tell you. But I distinctly remember her answer.


Basically:
A man and a woman fall in love, get married, and have a baby. 


To which I started bawling, because I hadn't been invited to the other weddings. Not even as a flower girl (I NEVER got to be a flower girl. A fact about which I was quite bitter, for a surprisingly long time.) You know... the weddings that had to have happened for my parents to have my younger siblings... since they have to get married to have a kid, since that's what she'd said.
Yeah... so then she actually told me the horrible, horrible truth. Now that I'm all growed up, it's actually quite fun. But then, it was the most disgusting thing I could even imagine. And she didn't pretty it up, with nonsense about birds and bees and seeds and flowers. Nope. She bought me "Where Did I Come From?"

It was informative, and since it backed up what I thought were disgusting lies to mislead me from the truth, I finally accepted how babies were made. Ick. But the pictures left a lot to be desired. "Rubanesque" would be a generous way to describe the people in the illustrations.


On the plus side, possibly years later, when I told younger sister one day when I tricked her into asking me how babies were made, she was outraged at MY heinous lies (which were really the squicky truth.)


I still hadn't known what a 'virgin' was, sadly, since the book didn't go into that, and my mom wasn't exactly forthcoming with the vocab. So when some older kid asked me and my friends if we were virgins, I said no, which resulted in gales of laughter and teasing. But since Madonna's "Like a Virgin" had recently come out, I figured if she was a virgin, I must not be. Ah well.