How I Told About the Birds and the Bees at Age Eight
The evolution of my understanding of ‘doing it’
For years I believed all insemination was artificial.
I knew enough birds and bees to know that somehow, someway, the little spermies had to get from the man’s ahem to a woman’s egg.
All the books and the teachers and the animated cartoons were real clear on this. It was just the mode of conveyance which was rather fuzzy and hush-hush in my eight-year-old world.
So not having the full picture, and being possessed of a highly creative imagination, I made the process up.
To Wit:
When the happy couple was ready to get mit child as it were, they went to a clinic. Probably not unlike a modern fertility clinic. Only with personal specifications.
Specifically, when the squirmy little spermies were extracted from the man’s ahem by some process that remained rather mysterious to me at the time, it was collected in a wee bright blue cup just like the one in my dolly’s tea set.
Then a nice nurse would take it over to the wife and would-be mom of the couple, sequestered in another part of the clinic since she had to disrobe. And since I didn’t know from turkey basters yet, I just imagined the nurse propping her hips up and pouring the lucky liquid directly into her vaginal orifice–-not a word I was ready to pronounce out loud yet.
Which Was a Good Thing
Because I would have severely butchered it with a hard G. Vagnia was the best I could do. I knew it wasn’t right, so I kept my little mouth shut. Later I would go on to mispronounce clitoris. To my no longer young but still misinformed mind, it rhymed with Deloris.
Later, when I was married, and my husband and I named our genitals, I had Itty and Bitty who of course were my two titties, and Delores was my clitoris. He was not nearly as imaginative. His ahem was simply, George.
To his credit that was an acknowledgment of one of our favorite stories of all time — John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Said husband was fond of imitating Lenny by saying, George, George tell about how we’re going to live off the fat of the land and I’ll have rabbits and get to hug ’em and squeeze ’em and, and, you know where that went.
But getting back to insemination Marilyn-style, you can imagine my shock when I got to third grade. The streetwise and savvy girls were whispering to the rest of us in the girl’s bathroom or the back of the school bus how someone, maybe an older brother or sister, was ‘doing it.’
‘It’ being insertion and penetration — something which had to hurt.
At first, I was shocked.
Then I was convinced they were lying and trying to scare me. And when I finally got past that, I was just horrified. ’Cause it had to hurt like hell. I swore this was not going to happen to me. Ever, ever, ever.
So you can imagine, a few years later when the stories got hotter how perplexed I was. I figured they had to lie or no one would do it. Never in a million years did it occur to me that doing it would be something I would actually do.
Let alone look forward to and enjoy. And maybe even go overboard with.
Until, that is, I was presented with a golden opportunity to experience ‘it’ firsthand.
Once was all it took to make a believer out of me.
*Using the word, “nothin’” in the Shakespearean sense, of course.