Epic Childhood # 1: The Facts of Life

Let's just say that, from a very young age, I was a precocious child. I was curious about everything (which, in some cases, got me in trouble); to this day, in fact, my mom likes to say to me, "If you were in the other room and things were quiet for two minutes, then I needed to be worried because you had gotten your way into something." In fact, in one instance, she found me making stairs out of a chest of drawers -- pulling them out at smaller and smaller intervals and using them to climb to the top -- blissfully unaware that this was the perfect prescription for it to tumble down on top of me. Thankfully, she caught me before the crash, reprimanded me, and sent me on my merry way. She tells me that I was a toddler at this point. Things only got more interesting from there.

One of the many conversations my mother had to deal with over this exciting childhood period of mine was, of course, a description of the birds and the bees. According to my mother, when you're raising children and they start asking where babies come from -- and they will do this at a surprisingly young age -- you must answer their questions as broadly as possible. In other words, you never go any deeper (no pun intended) than you have to: if they ask where a baby comes from, you say it grows in the mother's stomach. Simple as that. No more, no less. If they keep asking questions, you keep answering; until that point, you keep as mute as possible while still feeding their inquisitiveness. And, in most instances, when you answer in the simplest manner you can, your kid finds he or she is quite satisfied with the response and then drops the whole matter entirely (for the moment).

Now, in some cases -- ahem, mine -- this lack of deeper information causes children to formulate their own back stories to make up for the ... ahem, HOLES... in the story. I, for example, didn't get past the "when two people love each other very much, they decide to have a baby and the woman gets pregnant" part of the story. For the longest time, I remember thinking there was some strange biological, chemical reaction that happened when two people loved each other and wanted to have a child. I remember being so confused: how did the world know when people wanted to have a baby? Did they have to both sit down and just think really, really hard about it together? Was it just, like, an instant snap and suddenly you had children? How did this magical universe-baby-making-power decide how many you got? It all seemed so strange. In my theory, it looked something like this:

By extension, of course -- at least in my form of childhood logic -- this also meant that, if two people that both really wanted a baby (or happened to be thinking really hard about it), got too close to each other in the exact moment that they were both contemplating children, then the woman could accidentally get pregnant as a result. I spent many a night wondering just how many pregnancies occurred as a result of an accidental, brief encounter between two people who had never met. (I know look back on that sentence and realize the irony of my young intuition. Oh, the glories of alcohol.)

Now, when I was young, one of my favourite nighttime past times was having my mom come in and read my book to me. She would come in, lay next to me on the bed, and read a chapter to me (which usually ended up turning into at least two or three, since I always begged for more and never wanted to let her stop reading). She tells me that, on this particular night, I was maybe six or seven at the time. Somehow or another we got to talking about the facts of life -- she doesn't exactly remember how -- and once again I started asking her questions she didn't really want to have to answer.

My mom says that, after close to half an hour of her dancing around the truth, I finally asked an inescapable question and she was forced to tell me "the gritty details". I'd like to think I made it sufficiently awkward for her up to this point, and forced her to use the most clinical terminology throughout.

She took a deep breath, steeled herself, and "explained". She says she used maybe three or four sentences at most, but that it was more than sufficient to explain the basic mechanics of what apparatus was used, in what manner, and for what purpose.

There was a long pause after her response. She said I sat in silence for several seconds, digesting the information. My face flickered from expression to expression, trying to determine my opinion on the matter.

Even my mother, though -- with her wealth of experience as to my strange, and often exceedingly mature responses, was not prepared for what came next.

She says I made a shuddering noise like I was retching, and flapping my hands in the air, exclaimed:

All credit to my mom, she kept her composure. There was a moment of silence before she responded.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of many reasons why I love my mother.