One muggy summer morning in 1988, Ellie was dressing Max, her three-and-a-half-year-old son. As she tied his right shoe, he asked, “Where goin’, Mommy?”
She looked up and smiled at him. Ordinarily she let him dress himself, but, when she dressed him, he knew it meant they were going out. So smart, she thought proudly.
She patted the bulge in her tummy and said, “We’re going to see the baby doctor.”
“Oh.”
She took him by the hand and walked out to the tan Nissan Sentra in the garage, let him climb into his car seat, and strapped him in. She got behind the wheel, and pulled the car out of the garage and into the street.
“Hey, Mommy?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“How that baby got in you anyway?”
Years before they had children, Ellie and Jamie had decided they would never evade difficult questions. With their second child on the way she had read books on talking to your preschooler about sex. The best advice, she thought, was to answer your child’s first question simply, and let them guide the conversation with each question that followed.
Feeling smug, she said, “You know what an egg is, right?”
“Uh huh, from chickens.”
“Yes, that’s right. Mommies have eggs, too. But they are very, very tiny. So small you can’t see them.”
“Where they are?”
“In a very special place in my tummy.”
“The egg is the baby?”
“Yes.”
“But how?”
“How what, honey?”
“How have baby now?”
Oh, she thought, what to say now?
“Not know, Mommy?”
“Oh, yes I know. Well, let me think. Ah, yes. Your Daddy, all daddies really, also have something like an egg, too, but their eggs are tiny little swimmers. One of your Daddy’s swimmers joined Mommy’s egg and together they made the baby start to grow.”
“What ‘joined’?”
“The swimmer swims into the egg. They become one thing.”
“Oh.” Then Max was quiet, absorbing this astonishing bit of information. “But how got in your tummy?”
She pulled over, parked in a Kroger parking lot, and turned around to look at her son. He smiled at her, bright blue eyes beaming in his chubby pink face. She was prepared to tell her son the whole truth about sex, just not at the age of three-and-a-half.
“Ask that again, please.”
“How the swimmer got in your tummy?’
Dear Lord, she thought bracing herself. “Well, you know that you and Daddy each have a penis.”
“Uh huh.”
“And that means that someday you could be a daddy, but you can never be a mommy.”
“’Kay.”
“The reason that you can be a daddy is that the swimmers come out of the penis from the same opening that pee comes out of.”
“So, Daddy peed on you?”
What? “Oh, no, sweetie, you know that Daddy would never pee on me.”
“Yeah.”
She was quiet for a moment and he looked at her expectantly.
“You know that I don’t have a penis?”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, well, where you and Daddy have a penis, girls and Mommies have an opening to the inside. Sometimes the daddy, when the mommy says its okay, puts his penis in in the mommy’s opening. This is something that feels nice to the mommy and the daddy. It feels so nice that the swimmers come out of the daddy and go into the mommy. Then the swimmers swim to mommy’s tummy where the egg is.”
“Oh, huh, oh.” There was a look, something like confusion, on little boy’s face.
That’s it, she thought, there’s nothing more to tell him.
“Mommy, next time you and Daddy do that, can I watch?”
What? She thought in total confusion. What!?!
“We’ll have to ask Daddy about that,” was all she could think to say.
* * *
As Ellie entered her adolescence, her mother had left a book about sex designed for teenaged girls on the living room table, but never talked to her about the subject. Her husband’s parents were never that direct.
Jamie’s grandmother died in 1963 when he was eleven. Three days after her passing, Jamie and his mother, Marie, got into her Nash Rambler and drove the fifteen minutes to his grandmother’s house in west Akron. It was a warm, hazy spring day in mid-April. Walking from the car to the front stoop, he decided to ask his mother a question that he had been puzzling over during the ride.
“Hey, Mom, I have a question…”
“Just a minute, Jamie.” She sorted through her purse, found the house key, slipped it into the lock and opened the door.
They stepped into the vestibule; the house smelled strongly of Bengay, which his grandmother had used in liberal doses. To the left was a small telephone table and a doorway that led to the bedrooms and the bath. To the right was the living room, mostly hidden from view by entry way wall. Straight ahead at the back of the house was the dining room table and chairs. This table had always fascinated Jamie. It was a darkly stained, massive, round oak table. The four muscular legs curved in then back out. When closed it seated four. Leaves could be added that allowed it to accommodate up to ten. He had sat at this table many times and eaten what he considered to be terrible food.
“What did you want to ask?”
“Oh, yeah, so, I ‘ve notice that all the moms in our neighborhood are all married. I was just wondering if it was possible for a woman to have kids if she isn’t married.”
Marie turned to her son, and he saw a drop of sweat run down her forehead. Then she straightened to her full height, put her shoulders back and pronounced:
“It is physically possible, but not morally correct.”
That statement is the sum total of the sex education that Jamie received from his parents.
Late that summer Jamie was in his back yard with several of the neighborhood children – Bonnie and Bobby Bostian, Billy Bowles, Jamie’s sister Laurie, and her friend Leslie Kelly – all pre-adolescents. It was late in day, an hour after dinner, and very hot. They were sitting or lying in the grass and talking. Jamie didn’t have much to say in these discussions; he preferred day dreaming. Then Bonnie, the oldest in the group, said something that caught his attention.
“I can tell you one thing: only married ladies can have babies.”
“That’s not true.” Everybody looked at Jamie.
“What do you mean?” asked Bonnie.
“I mean, ladies don’t have be married to have babies.”
“How do you know?” she challenged him.
“My Mom told me.”
“She did not.”
“She did so.”
“Prove it.”
He shrugged, “Ok.”
He stood up, turned and stepped up onto the macadam driveway and the other children followed. He walked through the garage to the rear door, opened the screen and stepped into the family room, where he found his mother folding clothes.
To the right was downstairs half bath; to the left was a large fire place. In the corner, just beyond, was a stereo, and the on the far wall was a large window. Covering the linoleum floor was an oval, braided rug. His grandmother’s dining room table, which father had cut down to coffee table height, sat on the rug. On the wall opposite the fire place was a sofa where his mother sat, a pair of socks in hand.
Marie looked up at the faces of the ten- to twelve-year-old children with some surprise. Then she looked at her son who, oddly, seemed to have led them into the house.
“Mom, did you or did you not tell me that an unmarried woman could have a baby?”
She looked at the boys and girls waiting for her answer. A drop of sweat escaped her scalp and slid down the right side of her face.
“Yes,” she admitted, “I did.”
Jamie turned to the assembled children, and said, “See.” He turned and walk back outside and the group followed.
Marie put a hand to her face, then got up to call the mothers of the children that had just left her house.
* * *
In 1991 Jamie sat on the sofa in his own family room watching a college football game. During a commercial for Miller Lite, he found himself looking out the sliding glass door at the beautiful October afternoon. The autumn sunshine fell on a back yard full of leaves. He knew he should be out raking them up, but he just could not find energy to get off the sofa. Tomorrow, he thought.
The family room floor was piled with blankets, sleeping bags and sheets, which the children used to build forts and castles. To Jamie’s surprise an eight-year-old neighbor girl popped up out the pile; he didn’t know she was in the house much less the room.
“Ewwww,” she said wrinkling her nose, “that’s not true, is it, Jamie?”
“What’s not true, Ashley?”
“What Max says.” Max peeked out from under a sleeping bag, beaming a mischievous grin.
At that moment, Jamie had a great deal more sympathy for the sweat on his mother’s brow; he did not, however, have her courage.
“That is something you should ask your mother.”