[Critique Group 1] Mary-Jo submission for June 14

[Mary-Jo Lord]

Here is my submission for June 14. I apologize for the lateness.

 

Mary-Jo

 

The Intercourse

 

At age nine, I believed that information regardless of how it was acquired,
was worth sharing with whoever asked for it. My mother had just asked me
what I knew about sex. 

 

"I know about the intercourse," I said proudly.

 

Over the summer, we visited our relatives in California. My cousin Christy
had a book called "Your Body and You," or something like that. My mother
asked Christy to read it to me. We went outside by the tree with the low
branch for swinging and big seeds that dropped to the ground with a loud
thud. I practiced my swinging technique and gathered seeds for our
collection as Christy read.

 

The book seemed to go on and on about people, animals, and reproduction.
Then it talked about mating and this thing called "intercourse." Somehow as
I hung up-side-down from the tree branch, my then eight-year-old mind turned
"intercourse" into "the intercourse."

 

Christy laughed as she read the section about human reproduction and we
giggled as we asked the question "did our parents do THAT?" EEEEEEU! We
thought that that couples only did this thing if they wanted kids. Without
wanting to, I thought about other couples: The Whites next door with six
kids, Uncle Don and Aunt Rose with four, all of the other neighbors on the
street with all of those kids. Yuck! We decided that that's why we had small
families, only two kids.

 

Now, sitting in the family room with the television blaring something about
sex education in the schools, my mother seemed to have become speechless. I
could feel her stunned silence like possible trouble but I didn't know where
it came from. She recovered quickly and asked me what I knew about the
intercourse.

 

I tried to remember what Christy read. 

 

"If a couple wants to have a baby, they have to do this thing called the
intercourse. The man has to put his penis in the woman's vajeana. They have
to do this thing if the woman's doctor tells her that she can have a baby
and the couple wants to have one."

 

"Who told you about this?"

 

"It was in that book that you told Christy to read to me when we were there
last summer."

 

"I thought that book was about periods. Did you girls talk about this after
she read it?"

 

I didn't want to tell her that we talked about her and dad and Aunt Barbara
and Uncle Frank having small family's so they didn't have to do the
intercourse as often as people with big family's, so I told her "no."

 

She explained that it was called "sexual intercourse," not "the
Intercourse." She told me that a woman has a "vagina," not a "vajeana."
Then, she talked about love, commitment and responsibility. I was feeling
really confused, but when she asked if I understood, I told her that I did. 

 

That night as I tried to go to sleep, I thought about Christy's book and
what my mother had said. The book made the whole thing sound really gross,
but my mother made it sound like it was a good thing for grownups. It all
sounded disgusting to me, but the idea of my parents doing "that" made me
giggle. Christy and I decided that our parents adopted us to avoid doing
that awful thing. Then again, who would do "that thing" and have a baby just
to give it to someone else? The whole thing was too confusing for my
nine-year-old mind. I decided not to think about the intercourse for a long
time.

 

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