The Sex Talk -- The Basis For Life, the Bedrock of All Parental Trauma

Brad got a nice refresher from Ali, his six-year-old on his sex ed talk that we had so many years ago when he was eight the other day.  She told him that he has no womb.  She knows this because of a book she checked out of the library. 

Brad and Julia apparently don’t feel the initial sex talk I had with him him went well enough so many years ago provided a decent enough pattern, so they’ve allowed Ali to do it for herself it would appear.

I really didn’t do a very good job. I actually used paper and pencil with him for some unbelievable reason.  I have no defense.  It just seemed like a good idea at the time.  

Brad and I I were parked in my Volkswagen Beetle outside of Peruvian Park Elementary School for appropriate privacy, I remember, and I stammered and stuttered through the whole thing.  At the last minute I remembered talking about the rabbits we’d been raising and I recall saying “Didn’t it ever occur to you knowing how baby rabbits were made?” 

And he responded, “Yeah, but then I thought, ‘That couldn’t be.’” And our conversation was over.

Ben’s sex talk was even worse. I just kept talking to him waiting for  some

response to come over his face. It never came.  He stayed perfectly stoic.  I asked him later about it, years later, and he tried to comfort me by saying he knew most of it anyway. I knew it was a lie, but I took comfort from it anyway.

It’s amazing more of our children are not in analysis from the way we raise them. We probably ought to just give them books and let them learn about the Facts of Life on their own anyway. Didn’t most of our parents do a pretty lousy job of it, either by omission or blundering through.  

Friends had it all wrong, by-and-large, but at least they weren’t so traumatizing.

Shouldn't the Wearin' O' the Green Be Fun and All?

Is there a name for the fear of not wearing green on St. Patrick's Day?  Whatever it is, I have it.

I think my mother gave it to me.  She worried that I'd end up at school not wearing green and get pinched.  I don't know how many friends I had that would really hurt me bad if I didn't happen to remember, but I don't think there were that many.  I had nice enough friends.  Besides, didn't teachers pin shamrocks on people who forgot to bring them into the fold?

I wonder if her mother made her have this craziness.  Maybe it went back generations.  The neuroses, I mean.

I even worry now about it.  About the morning when I'm not quite fully dressed.  Carl wouldn't hurt me if he pinched me and he's never even pinched me in all forty-four years of marriage.  This is nuts.

Those Irish.  They've ruined something that should have been fun-filled and binding.

Justice for Henrietta

You have those stories that hit you and stay with you for years giving you pause more than once and making you think, cringingly again and again?  One to me was the story of Henrietta Lacks.  It came up again the other day with some consolation.  Here's the link:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html

It's been years and years ago that I first heard of this woman and her ubiquitous cancer cells and she creeped me out then and gave me periodic willies ever since.  I thought how cruel of history to remember her so horribly -- to have her cells torment labs throughout the world like they have.

The story then was that when labs thought that they were culturing one thing, HeLa, was actually on the job.  it was horrifying.  Henrietta Lacks' cells somehow migrated from lab to lab throughout the world, appearing in cultures everywhere: HeLa cells.  The poor woman had become something worse than Frankenstein's monster having done nothing more than dying tragically and much too young.

I'm grateful to have learned that her life meant more than that.  Her cells actually helped as the Smithsonian Magazine reports.  That she's not bedeviling science but helping post-mortem.  I'm also glad that Henrietta Lacks, whose pretty face I finally see, can rest in peace in my heart.

What's With All These Changes Anyway

I have a hard time remembering to cough into my  elbow.  I just can't get it

I've had a cough since the swine flu struck a month ago and when the urge hits, I first go for my hands, because I have a big gob of Kleenex there, then I remember the elbow drill, go for that, remember the gunk that flies, lunge for the Kleenex again, elbow, spew, charge for the door, redden in the face, horrify others, make the sign for "Make way for one who is unclean", and pass out before having to make eye contact with anyone.  All the while I'm holding back a cough.

Five-year-olds make it look so automatic.  I can't do it.  It just doesn't work.  Maybe it's because my arms are just too long.  I'm afraid of clubbing my neighbor.  Maybe it's because of all the gesturing that takes place.  Maybe it's because I end up feeling like a big bag of germs coughing into my clothes like that.  I don't know.  I just liked coughing into my hands.  It's discreet, handy and quite lady-like.  Coughing into your elbow indeed.

I'm smart enough to not want to shake hands with someone holding a big handful of used Kleenex.  Why isn't everyone else?  I'm really not that bright.

Spiders and Guilt - They Can Relate

I must have been four years old because we were living at 938 Kensington Avenue in Salt Lake City when I remember being in the backyard looking at my mother's flowers.  She always had a great flower garden.  This particular day, there was a big spider web bridging two rows of tall zinnia's with a big, fat yellow and black spider squatting right in the middle.

Then the tension began when mother came out into the garden.  She approached the spider.  I felt I should warn her but something stopped me.  I think I really was afraid of how my voice would sound as I shouted the alarm.  What if I startled her so that she fell right into the spider?  I sat in fear watching.

She came to the spider, felt the web, and started back a little saying something like "whoops!"  I don't think she was even afraid of that spider.

But it was years before I didn't feel guilty when I thought of the incident.  I felt I had somehow let her down by not warning her.  Silly as it sounds, the feeling really seemed legitimate for years.  It might even now a little.

Because of that, I think even today that little kids feel the emotions like guilt, embarrassment, shame, inadequacy and the like just like adults even when they're very small.  Do you remember anything similar?