The facts of life

I sort of recall the day my mother tried to tell me about “the facts of life,” or the ones that pertained to the getting a period.  She had sent away for the Modess kit of visual aids and granny maxi pads with an elastic belt that girls were supposed to wear under their gigantic underpants.  On the allotted day, which she must have dreaded, she sat me down on the scratchy, green couch.  I’m sure she was praying that my grandpa wouldn’t walk in mid-speech.  I was 11 years old, and what I mainly remember from “the talk” was that soon I would start bleeding.  My mom giggled while trying to tell me that it was the start of something wonderful.

But the granny pads and bizarre elastic girdle, like a highly ineffectual chastity belt, told another story — one that eluded larger meaning in favor of paper products and talk of “that time of the month.”  I don’t blame my mom for failing to come up with an evolved and comprehensive approach; it was 1980, and she was a 32-year-old single mom with two young kids and not much of a road map other than a mishmash of Redbook and textbooks that she fell asleep reading after her long day at work and in college classes.

The person who actually told me where babies came from was my best friend Amy.  We were both six years old, hanging out on my candy-striped swing set.  She had three older brothers, and there wasn’t much she didn’t know.  I was indignant when she explained baby-making to me.  I might have even called her a liar.  Still, the utterly bizarre mechanics she had described stayed with me, and the story must have been part of the fetid soup of embarrassing period stories, adolescent hormones, and clandestine, 1980s R-rated movies that helped me eventually put the pieces together by the time I was a teenager.

All of this was on my mind last month when Betsy Brown Braun, who facilitates my monthly parenting group, spoke about “the facts of life.”  She said that if by the age of six, a child hadn’t heard some realistic version of “where babies come from” from his parent, he will have heard it from someone else.  This was sobering and implied a whole cascade of trust and truthfulness that could be initiated or evaded as a result.  Prior to hearing this, I had vague notions of talking about X and Y chromosomes or animal babies or a similar wishy-washy conversation with my older child, who is nine years old.  I left class with the sex talk much higher on my parenting agenda.

Out of respect for my kids’ future ability to search the Internet, I’m not going to delve into the conversations in detail.  We spoke with them one by one.  My daughter, the nine-year-old, had to be almost physically restrained to stay in the room while we spoke.  My husband and I sounded like stereotypes of open-minded parents, covering the bases and forcing ourselves not to laugh while she averted her eyes and claimed to know everything already.  My son, the six-year-old, looked horrified when I talked turkey with him.  I took off from his “kissing in movies is so gross” statement to segue into “where babies come from.”  It was like the kindergarten version of the scene in “American Pie” when Eugene Levy talks to his son about sex: cringeworthy, but hey, now that’s out of the way.  (And to my mild credit, I didn’t muck it up so badly.  He’s had a lot of questions since then, most kind of gross and out of left field.)

I don’t know if I did the right thing, or if I did it in the right way.  But as a parent and a writer, I do buy into the whole “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” romantic ideal.  May my fumbling attempt be sufficient.