The Words - An Autobiography

Summer Camp

I have no memory of when I first began feeling guilty and ashamed about sex. But it seemed I always had, even before I had any idea what sex was - it was not a good thing. It was bad. It was dirty. "Don't touch yourself there," I was warned, and "Close the bathroom door." And, "Don't look at your sister when she's naked."

But I had a lot of questions and had no sense of boundaries nor when to quit. "That's personal," my mother would tell me. "You don't ask those questions." "We don't talk about those things." My mother thought I had an unhealthy interest in sex for someone my age. No matter my age.

"What's that?" To my mother's dismay, I asked my father, pointing at his penis, while I took a bath and he stood at the toilet.

"That's my baby maker."

My mother scolded him for talking that way in front of the kids. And did he need to do that right at that moment?

Yeah, he told her he did, most urgently.

I was probably four the first time I asked my mother, "Where do babies come from?"

"Mommy's belly," she told me. But I knew that. She had a big belly, then a baby, my sister, and her big belly was gone. I'd figured out some things myself. I wanted to understand how they got there but wasn't sure what questions to ask.

I tended to overcomplicate things, and several weeks later, I simply asked, "How do they get in there?"

"Daddy puts them in there," my father explained, "And mommy is thrilled when I do."

"If you can't be helpful," my mother hissed at him, "Would you please shut up?" Then, too me, she insisted, "God puts them there."

"Is daddy a liar because he said...?"

"You are too young for this discussion. God puts them there," she reiterated, "That's all you need to know for now."

I was probably six when I first dared to ask, "What does 'fuck' mean?" I wasn't sure where I'd first heard the word.

My father only got as far as, "That's when-"

Which was when my mother stepped into the room with a look of fury for him, then turned to me. "I better never hear that word come from your mouth again! Go to your room before I wash out your mouth with soap."

I managed to scurry to my room before she changed her mind that time, but I do remember hating the taste of soap. I still had a lot of unanswered questions about sex, which grew more mysterious and intriguing since it seemed such a bad thing to ask about. At some point, I got the idea the unforgivable sin I'd heard mentioned at church must have something to do with sex and maybe the word 'fuck'.

I was probably eight when a kid at lunch passed me a folded handful of pages torn from a magazine of his father's about which he'd been bragging. Each page had pictures of women with naked breasts. I didn't know why they were exciting, but they were. I also knew it was wrong to have those pictures. It was wrong to look at them. It was wrong that they excited me. But I looked at them every chance I had. Then my mother discovered where I'd hidden them while cleaning my room. If it were possible to die of shame, I would have at that moment.

"What do you have to say for yourself?" she'd demanded, waving the pages filled with pictures of bare-breasted women at me.

I felt as if she'd dowsed me in ice-cold water. I stood paralyzed and mute while she'd stared directly into my soul. She finally tore the magazine pages into pieces and told me that she'd better never find me with that kind of thing again. I still had no notion of what sex was, only that I'd seen pictures of a part of a woman's anatomy normally covered in clothing, even if the tiniest of bikini tops, with no comprehension of my natural physical and emotional reactions, nor why I felt so guilty about having them. But I was certain that something must be wrong with me to feel the way I did at times.