And then I knew

Delagar’s post about her daughter’s new books, the ones about puberty and such, well it got me to thinking about my own lack of education in that area. I had older sisters and they were never given the talk, or so they say. My mother never gave me the talk and when I was around eight or maybe nine, all three of my older sisters became “expecting” as my mother so careful called it, in fact, when one of my older sisters said pregnant, my mother shushed her. So, because I was so nosy and wanted to know what it was that was making my sisters so big and round and all the talk about new babies, I went to the library and looked up pregnant, and after reading all of that, began to search each of the words that I had read, like fallopian tubes, ovaries, uterus, and even menstruation and that is how I learned about the birds and the bees, right there at the table in front of the encyclopedias on a huge oak table that smelled faintly of Murphy’s oil.