Pitching a Tent or What's with the Produce Bag, Mom?: a journey into the wonderful world of puberty

    Who was the first person to give you info -- correct or not -- on how to "make babies"?
    Submitted by Manon-It-All.

When I was in the fourth grade the word 'blowjob' was introduced into my vocabulary as I had begun to overhear this mysterious word seemingly everywhere within earshot at school: in the cafeteria, the halls, near the bathrooms, by the water fountains. The 5th and 6th grade boys were the primary culprits.  Using this word in tandem with a girls name would set them off in a surreptitious fit of laughter.  I knew this word was taboo.  I knew it was bad and that I would get in trouble for saying it.  I knew there was something "sexy" about it but I had NO idea what it meant or how to come by this information. In a tizzy to finally quash the query, I turned to my sweet catholic ESL mother for guidance. 

After school one day I went into the kitchen as my mother was making preparations for dinner and sat down at the table.  Without introduction I blurted out "Mom, what's a blowjob?".  She barely flinched as she looked over her shoulder at me and paused for a second.  Calmly, she walked toward the drawer where we kept our collection of clear vegetable bags from the produce section of the grocery store and extracted one.  She then sat across from me and stared me dead in the face.  I was starting to get a little scared.  She looked so serious, as if I had asked about raising the dead, as if she were sending me to my doom.   "What have i gotten myself into?"  I thought.   "How bad could this blow job thing really be?"

Without diverting her gaze in the slightest, she slid her hand over the flimsy & limp clear plastic resting her grip around the top.  She brought it to her lips, and proceeded to inflate the bag.  To, well, blow.  Air began to fill the space and I noted how cylindrical those little bags really are.  Once the bag was fully inflated and quite firm she pulled it away from her mouth holding it tight in her left hand so as not to let any air out and said "That" her right hand slamming and popping the plastic bag, the sound jolting me in my seat, "was a blow job."  And without any further explanation she got up from her seat and went back to chopping vegetables.

Over the course of the next year, knowing that my parents were no help and too embarrassed to talk to anyone else, I became obsessed with the things I had no answers to.  Everything was changing in me and on me and around me there were signs everywhere that people knew the things I didn't: that there was a whole lexicon of things sexual and physical that i wasn't privy to, that people were doing things scantily clad in dimly lit rooms and casually making grown-up asides about the events after the fact while smoking a cigarette or sipping on brandy or some other bullshit adult charade.  I would see the allusions in movies.  I could see the answers on the screen but, as if these were in written in Sanskrit, I couldn't decipher their meanings.  Actors knew.  Teachers knew.  All adults knew but didn't want kids to.  Kids thought they knew or would pretend to know but really just wanted to know more. 

All these assholes knew the secret, meanwhile, I was waking up with strange things happening to me.  I swear I just woke up with pubes one day.  I have no gradual memory of this.  One day there was nothing and the next there was and it scared the fuck out of me. I was frustrated, pissed off, confused.   "What is sex and why is it hijacking my body?"   Fed up one weekend, I biked to the library.  I wandered the isles and rows until I found what I was looking for:  SEX, PUBERTY, MORE ABOUT SEX.  I pulled about fifteen books that seemed to reveal the 'mysteries' I had for so long been in the dark about, checked out, and rode home.

In a haste, I took the camping gear out of the closet, ran to the back yard, and erected a tent under the avocado tree.  Only later would I recognize the pun implicit in this little self-discovery camping story.  My parents asked what I was up to:  "Homework" the catch-all reply.  I devoured the information on the pages.    Gonads. Hormones. Sexual Maturation.  Nocturnal emissions.  Menses. Ovulation.  Heavy petting.  Intercourse.  Clitoris.  Orgasm.  Ejaculation. Sperm.  Uterus. Enlightenment.  Food was brought to me so I stayed for two days reading, only coming out to use the bathroom, which, overnight, had been transformed into a magic chamber for me to observe these new findings about my body.  Now I knew.  I was reaching 'sexual maturation'.   Babies wanted to get made in me.  Men wanted to spend time in me.  I was a hot commodity.  If Whitney Houston was right and the children were the future then I had the future in me.  My body was sacred.  Fifteen books worth and all of a sudden I had all the power in the world in my teeny body.