When I was in third grade, with two younger siblings, I finally asked my parents where babies came from. They smiled uncomfortably and looked at each other in a way that said, "The day has come."
"Where do babies come from?" I repeated.
"Well," my father volunteered — the one syllable hanging on his tongue like good wine — "two people have to love each other very much."
"Oh." Good enough. "Well how long does it take?"
"Nine months," my mother volunteered.
"Oh."
I was satisfied with the answer. What did I know? I had never heard any different — as opposed to the four-year-old daughters of two separate friends, who each volunteered recently that babies come from "my mommy's vagina." Needless to say, my parents must have been ecstatic that I was satisfied with their non-answer.
It seemed very simple to me. Too simple maybe. But then again, I had never tried it.
I figured I'd give it a shot. I tried to think of which girl in the third grade I loved enough to make her have a baby. I wondered if I'd even have to tell her, or just love her and wait nine months. Kelly? She kissed me once. Maybe she was already pregnant. I didn't think I loved her when she kissed me, but who knew?
It was then that the full impact of this love thing hit me. Forget the girls in class. What about my girlfriends on TV? Leather Tuscadero, Daisy Duke, two out of three Charlie's Angels (sorry Kate). I couldn't say exactly whether I was more in love with Suzy Quatro, Barbara Bach, Jaqueline Smith, or Farrah Fawcett, but clearly — as the Notorious B.I.G. once sung — "I see some ladies tonight that should be havin' my baby."
In any case, I waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing. I started to think maybe there was more to it than my folks had told me. I thought back on it. "Two people have to love each other very much." Ah. Okay, so maybe that was the catch. "Girlfriends" needed to reciprocate your love. Now we're getting somewhere.
But who knew how women felt and what they thought. (I still don't know.) But for argument's sake, say one loved me back. Then she'd get pregnant? Again, I'd have to wait nine months to find out. And there was the nagging Charlie's Angels question. I wondered: if Jaqueline or Farrah were pregnant, would they still be on the show? You can imagine my concern.
At school, it didn't strike me that anyone in my class was pregnant. But I was getting a little scared. Whom had I been in love with — and when? I wasn't ready to be a father. I was hardly even ready to be an older brother. It all seemed like a heavy responsibility, and one that had little to do with the other things I loved — namely hockey, and pasta, and TV.
A few short years later, my friends and I knew all the titillating facts about where babies came from, and had seen all the requisite diagrams and such — which we augmented with full-color glossy photos of airbrushed nakedness from the drawers and bookshelves of our 1970s suburban fathers, all of whom seemed to have countless samples of "gentlemen's magazines."
But still, we had no real concept of what sex was all about.
Around these Playboy (or as one younger neighbor mistakenly called them, Pep Boys) years, one friend described walking in on his parents several years earlier while they were "making Shelley," as he called it (he had a younger sister, Michelle). At the time, it didn't occur to either of us to question his logic: his parents were having sex, he had a younger sister, therefore, he must have seen them in the process of creating his younger sister.
It would be yet another year or so before we finally understood — despite our preoccupation with the feathered-hair girls of prime-time TV and our familiarity with the soft bits of the female anatomy — that sex was not just for procreation, but for recreation.
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My older daughter is three-and-a-half. It is only a matter of time before she is no longer satisfied with knowing that from time to time, our friends and acquaintances have a "baby belly." She'll be looking for answers, and we'll be expected to supply them. Still, AKL and I have not discussed what our story is, let alone gotten it straight.
I don't imagine it will start and end with the conceptually obtuse "two people have to love each other very much." Then again, I don't see it containing only the clinical facts either. (Though, clearly, I might be forced to say the word vagina.) For me, and for my kids, the story lies somewhere in between, I imagine, in that gray area that, admittedly, I sometimes still don't quite understand myself.






Thanks for that.
The threat of an impending slow collapse of the house was perhaps what caused you folks to stow so many crucifixes around the place. We found all manner of them in hallways, and closets, and cupboards, and crawl spaces — and not a damn one glow-in-the-dark.