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One of my favorite aspects of the podcast are the questions they ask the audience to get us thinking about our own childhoods.
In the second episode, they asked, "Where did you think babies came from?"
Well, I have an answer for them. (And for you.)
***
By five years old, I'd already seen my mom pregnant twice. I'd memorably caught a birth scene on All My Children, The Young and the Restless or General Hospital where a woman in a beige room, a long hospital gown and shoes screamed in pain.
"Why is she screaming?" I asked Mom at four years old.
"She's having a baby," Mom told me.
Right then and there, I decided, I was going to adopt.
***
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| [Tonia, left, and Tara, right, reunited with our Cabbage Patch dolls, Jennifer and Rainiya) |
***
We played elaborate games of pretend with our dolls. Birth trauma was not off limits. Nothing was off-limits:
"Here! Sissy! Sissy! she says, going through the great tunnel, to get a new baby that's gonna be mine."
"There. She's sleeping."
"Yeah. She's just preemie."
"...Because she got a cold and she coughed on her. And she didn't even cover her mouth. She didn't even cover her nose, she just pachooed right on the baby, and didn't blow her nose so it just runned all the way down her neck, and all the way down to her sister! And all the way down to her toes!"
"'Oh, my precious little honey darling,' says her grandmother. This'll be her grandmother. 'She's so precious...'"
"She got sick. She needs to get lots of rest. She's in the hospital....the same room where you get the baby out. And I have a baby crib right here, all fixed."
"Why don't you go have a seat, Mother? Right here, and lie down. And watch your baby...and stay with your kid?"
While some of the particulars weren't clear, I knew birth - from the point of view of the baby - and a twin at that, had to be scary. Trying to follow your sister out a great tunnel into the bright loud world, with sickness and early births was traumatic.
I was an informed child, okay?
And I had a vivid imagination.
So vivid, in fact that I still recall what I was positive happened to all of the food I ate when I was around this age.
***
I was young enough to still be wearing a bib (which our family called 'aprons' because bibs were for babies...) But I was old enough to have definite likes and dislikes.
Macaroni and cheese? Like.
Chow Mein? Dislike.
But whether I liked something or not, I had to eat it. Such is life when you're four.
I coped by imagining what happened to my food after I swallowed it:
The food would drop, whole, into a big dark cave with plenty of space. It fell from such a great height that everything landed with a satisfying splat onto the cave floor of my insides.
There were two giant piles on either side. On the left? Every food I liked. And on the right? Everything I hated.
In my mind's eye, the food was separated by a tiny person with a shovel, who moved whole over easy eggs to one side and Malt-O-Meal to the other.
I was convinced this whole scenario was real, probably because I could not conceive of a world where all my food just went to the same place inside me...
Without even doing me the courtesy of factoring in whether I liked it or not.
***
Where did you think babies came from?
Informed child + vivid imagination.
ReplyDeleteFeels a bit like a gastronomic heaven and hell, doesn't it Tonia?
In my family aprons were for adults and for kitchen workers. Unless art was being done.
The thing about soap operas and babies that confused me was that they weren't actually babies. And later on I knew/learnt that twins were being used. And last year I was reading on Quora on how they got baby actors to cry.
I was also very interested in where plants and animals came from.
In Australia there are two monotreme species - echidnas and platypuses. Most of the other species I knew had eggs outside - for example, snakes and spiders.
And in a linguistics textbook I read about "viviparous" [which is species which come alive].
Soap operas are fairly selective about what bodily functions can be shown. Especially the ones that are considered more gross-out.
As for where babies come from: I was sure they did not just appear [or disappear for that matter].
I knew that babies kicked from the inside.
And that birth pangs were probably extended stomach aches.
I would read in magazines about in-vitro fertilisation and test-tubes and other forms of assisted reproduction.
And that you had to relax your muscles.
"And later on I knew/learnt that twins were being used."
DeleteYES -- I learned this really early -- around age 6, because my favorite show was "Full House" where twins starred as the youngest child.