The Birds and the Bees

I knew this day would come.

I knew.

Momma’s always know.

We buy a book to have on hand for when this day arrives.

We wait, biting our nails, knowing some day soon the questions will be asked.

Where did I come from?

or

How was I born?

or

What is sex?

We rehearse in our mind exactly what we’ll say. The moment we will resort to the book. Read it aloud. Kindly answer every question our curious child has, making sure not to embarrass him and happy he is confident enough in our parenting skills to even ask such a question. The guts it must take for him to work up the nerve to ask the questions that are burning in his mind.

Little did I know. Little did I know.

No preparation could have e.v.e.r braced me for the words that were to come from my 11 year olds mouth.

Here we were driving down the road after our daily 3:00 pm carpool rush.

He is buckled into the front seat. Anthony and all the little’s are buckled into their seats in the two back rows of the Suburban.

The radio is playing… and out of the blue he says….

Mom, are you a virgin?

As my car veers towards the left and I recover from almost hitting the concrete median, I look at him with eyes as big as half dollars and for some reason I am just not sure what to say exactly. I wanted to ask him which of his friends at school dared him to ask this question. But out of my mouth come these words….

Garrett, my child of logic and reasoning, was actually satisfied with this response.

But then Anthony chimes in from the backseat….

Oh my lands!

No way! You have got to be kidding me!

Now I am stuck.

Where is my book? I was not ready for this…

Today? Why today? Any other day… just no today!

As they giggle, like boys do, I put them off until we get home. Where I have the book… the answers…. the easy response.

We get home and while the smaller ones are playing in their room, I tell the bigger boys to sit at the table. They giggle. Embarrassed, but finding the topic very humorous, in an adolescent kind of way.

What’s The Big Secret, a book my friend Kate told me about when Garrett was little. I had found it at Half Price Books about a year ago and tucked it away for this very day!

I open up to the first page. ‘How are boys and girls different’…. they giggle. With their smarty pants responses they are naming off the ways which they know girls are different. Rooting each other on with laughs of encouragement.

I start to read and they giggle some more.

We get to the page about anatomy and our bodies.

They laugh out loud. ‘Nipple?’, they say with a Bevis and Butthead laugh.

Wanting them to take this serious, I hand them paper for taking notes on. Anything to stop the giggling. In my mind I am thinking… what mother expects note taking during the birds and the bee’s talk?

We read about how boys and girls are different, how to tell boys and girls apart, is sex a dirty word, growing a baby, where babies come from, why we have belly buttons, and all the fun topics in between.

Still lots of giggling but they were taking notes (I did not know what else to do to make it a little less awkward).

As we finished the book I asked them if they had any questions…. and you guessed it- they just giggled.

No questions. Simply laughing.

They quickly get up from the table, so glad it is over. Off they went…. giggling and talking amongst themselves about what we had read.

That certainly did not go as I had planned in my head 11 years ago when I became a mother. I sat there thinking- what the heck just happened?

I picked their notes up off the table (obviously something they did not want to keep). And before I tossed them I took a quick look at what each of them had written.

As you may recall Anthony is dyslexic and struggles a lot with spelling, however he does really well with words that are spelled phonetically… in other words, words that are spelled exactly as they sound.

Apparently vagina is one of those words, according to his sheet of notes anyway. He spelled it correctly more than once!

Oh, the joys of having five boys. Not exactly how I envisioned the birds and the bees talk. But I do know this, raising a house full of boys, there is never ever a dull moment I tell you!

If this offends you, I’m sorry. It is the story of my life! (And check the book out!)