Planting the Garden
A Spock baby recalls his sexual education
By Vance Briceland
My nickname, for the first two years of my life, was "Boo." For some years I assumed it was a quaint and touching tribute to To Kill a Mockingbird, a film that made a great impression on me after I first saw it as a late-night movie on television. I could never forget the moment when Scout discovers her reclusive neighbor behind the bedroom door, and says shyly, "Hey Boo!" It was not much of an imaginative leap to picture my parents hovering above my crib, waggling rattles in the direction of my questing fingers, and saying delightedly, "Hey Boo! Hey Boo!"
I made the unfortunate mistake of asking my mother about the nickname, however, quite early in my teen years. She was peeling apples for a pie at the kitchen counter, and appeared distinctly uncomfortable when I broached the subject. "I told Mr. Feinstein today that you guys really thought Harper Lee was pretty cool, to give me a nickname out of her book," I said. My mother cleared her throat and continued to peel. "He says that most parents don't encourage kids to read too much." Bits of peel flew wildly across the counter. "We're seeing To Kill a Mockingbird in class next week."
"We didn't call you 'Boo' because of Boo Radley," she finally said, nervously discarding the apple in her hand because while I'd been nattering on, she'd pared away most of the fruit along with the skins.
"No?"
"No. Now, don't take this the wrong way, but we called you Boo because you were a boo-boo, honey." She turned to me and steeled herself to deliver the horrifying news. "We called you Boo because you were an accident. But you know we love you and never regretted having you!"
I will always associate the veils of innocence being ripped from before my face with the smell of golden delicious.
A willingness to accept untested assumptions about the facts of life was the hallmark of my first decade, however. I never really much thought about where babies came from; my parents, having dutifully read Dr. Spock's manual for child-rearing, refrained from filling my head with cabbage patch and stork fictions, and waited for me to ask. And waited. And waited.
Waited in vain, however, for I had assimilated the fact that babies came from a mommy's tummy. Apparently that was all I needed to know. It never occurred to me to ask how they might have gotten there. In this respect I was quite unlike my sister, who at the age of three began pestering my parents for more information about the genesis of babies. Academics that they were, my parents gave her an abstract account of how a baby grows in the tummy of a wife after her husband had planted the seeds in her. She seemed satisfied for a while, and my parents clutched their copy of Baby and Child Care and looked up to heaven and murmured, "Thank you, Dr. Spock."
It was a year later that we all traveled to Baltimore for the wedding of my father's sister. Alicia was slightly upset with my parents because they had refused to let her be the flower girl for the ceremony, and felt she had been cheated of the spotlight. The morning of the ceremony we found her in the back yard of my grandmother's house, dressed up in her Sunday outfit, grimly clutching a rust-kissed watering can for dear life. Assuming her mania for the watering can had something to do with a destiny denied as a flower girl, my mother and father eventually wheedled it out of her grasp with the promise of cake and ice cream at the reception.
At the ceremony my parents let loose an audible sigh of relief when Alicia did not, in a jealous rage, lunge at the flower girl as she scattered rose petals down the aisle. Alicia was in fact very well behaved through the first part of the wedding, and it was only when my aunt and her new husband started to exchange their vows that she began to kick up a ruckus. She murmured something to my mother, who shushed her. She repeated her request, a little more loudly, and received another shush. She started to struggle, and managed to gain a foothold on the pew, where she stood up and ran a safe distance away.
"Sit down," my mother said, in a voice loud enough to make Aunt Martha stop in the middle of her "I do."
"I want to see it!" My sister is an opera singer, and even at that young age she had an immense lung capacity. She was using it, too.
"Sit down," my mother hissed.
"No! NO! I want to see him plant the seeds in her! I want to see him plant the seeds in her!" The congregation gasped. My mother leapt to her feet, horrified, and chased my sister down the aisle until she scooped her up and dragged her in the direction of the foyer, Alicia all the while expressing at the top of her not inconsiderable four year old voice her desire to witness the agricultural phenomenon experienced by a husband and his new wife.
My mother and father held a post-mortem in the car after the funeral, while Alicia slept off her tantrum in the back seat with me. "It was you who told her about seeds," my mother said, half-accusingly.
"We'll have to have a talk with her when we get back to Richmond."
My mother sighed. "I guess that explains the watering can."
"Heh! Heh! Heh!" My father had a slow, nasal laugh. "I wonder how Martha would have enjoyed being watered there. Heh! Heh! Heh!"
"Alan!"
"Heh! Heh! Heh!"
"That's not funny!" My mother sounded as if she was having doubts about her ability to raise children. "I didn't know she thought you meant that kind of seed."
"What do seeds have to do with it?" I piped up from the back seat.
My mother turned around. "Your sister thought that the seeds a man plants in a woman were the kind of you get out of a packet. Remember when we planted bean seeds and they grew into bean plants?"
I nodded. "What does that have to do with babies?"
My mother turned to look at my father with some alarm. "Honey, you know how babies are made, don't you?"
"Sure," I said, and proceeded to related what Theresa Breschel had told us all on the first day of school, thus quickly establishing herself as the top dog of the second grade. "A husband and a wife go into a men's room and drop their pants and rub their bottoms together and then nine months later they have a baby."
Well, my mother blamed me for years after for putting the dent in our Dodge Dart, but I know for a fact that when my father swerved upon hearing my assertions, he missed the Baltimore city bus with inches to spare. That dent came years later.
In order to spare themselves any future incidents of humiliation that exposed their faulty parenting skills, either public or private, both my parents took a much more aggressive approach to sexual education. By the end of the weekend I had a firm grasp on reproductive basics; however, when I flatly challenged Theresa on the matter, she claimed to have known all along. In fact, she announced before the entire second grade class during recess, while the teacher was off in a corner having a smoke, she was just trying to see who was still a baby and didn't know. Sadly, I never achieved top dog status, in the second grade.
When I was thirteen, some time after the Boo incident, my mother and father decided to broaden my education. My father walked into my bedroom, mumbled, "Here, read this and if you have any questions ask your mother or me," and dropped a book on the bed. I peered at the greenish cover of the paperback, and mouthed the title: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.
My first read-through of Dr. Reuben's book was far from enlightening. In fact, I felt as if I'd stumbled into some alternate world in which everyone had entirely different body parts from my own, and did all sorts of interesting and incomprehensible things with them. I might have been reading Everything You Always Wanted to Know about the Sex Life of the Darter Snail, for all the relevance it seemed to have to me.
I had a revelation the week after, though. My parents always shunned cutesy euphemisms for the more private portions of the body, and were careful to use the correct terminology with us-however, they'd never actually reviewed the spelling of them. Suppose this weird thing in the book that the man was supposed to have, but of which I'd certainly never heard, didn't actually rhyme with 'tennis'? And this other thing Dr. Reuben kept talking about that the woman boasted, what if I pronounced the first part of it so it didn't rhyme, as it appeared to, with 'pagan'?
Suddenly everything made sense.
Even with the good doctor's help, however, I still was never top dog in my middle school classes. I had a vast amount of information in my brain on the point, and could hold discourse quite scientifically on anything from the journey the sperm makes as it swims towards the egg to S&M to menopause, and yet none of it ever won me any brownie points. The kid whose dad knew someone who had seen Deep Throat . . . he was the one with infamy.
Now, on one technical point I have to admit I was entirely confused: the matter of circumcision. Dr. Reuben explained it in dry and technical terms in his magnum opus, but I was still unable to understand exactly what happened during it. The dictionary wasn't helpful, either. In true dictionary form, it told me that circumcision was the removal of the foreskin, usually at infancy; it then went on to define the foreskin as something that removed during circumcision. I never could quite come to an understanding of exactly what countless doctors were snipping off in hospitals across the country. More importantly, with poor documentation like this, how was I supposed to know whether I was circumcised or not?
Admittedly, I should have asked my parents immediately, rather than wonder about it. I even had the perfect opportunity at one point. One of the networks, just in time for Easter, programmed a miniseries based on the Old Testament. It was a lavish production, replete with sandy locations, temple harlots with smoldering eyes, and a state of the art parting of the Red Sea. I was in the living room watching it while my mother was curled up with a mystery novel on the couch, when suddenly I witnessed a startling scene. An exterior shot of a tent. The glint of a knife. A baby's cry. Then the raven-haired Zipporah marched out of the tent, knife still in one hand, something indeterminate in the other, and spat at the fellow playing Moses. Brandishing the knife, she screamed at him over the baby's heart-rending wails of pain, "I have performed the circumcision, and here is the proof! Surely you are a bridegroom of blood!" and then with her other hand she flung something large and meaty into the dust at his feet.
I involuntarily clenched my legs at the knee and yelled out, "HOLY COW!" What the hell was that thing she had thrown at Moses? It looked like a entire chicken breast, and a rather well-fed chicken at that. Where in the world had all that come from?
A moment later my mother looked up vaguely from her detective novel. "Holy cow? Oh, are they at the ten commandments already?"
Now, it would have been the perfect opportunity at that point to say something like, "The biological waste after a circumcision wouldn't have been an hefty handful's worth, would it?", or even, "Say mom, exactly what did ol' Zipporah saw off there?" But unwisely, I kept my mouth shut.
I paid for my silence. Though I wondered for years, I didn't find out whether or not I was circumcised until I was nearly seventeen. Of all the places I had to find out, it was in Sunday School.
It was the year my parents volunteered to teach the high school Sunday School class, of which it was my misfortune to be a member. Their credentials were probably better than anyone else's-my father had a doctorate in history, and my mother had a graduate degree in religion, and they'd proposed to examine the Old Testament from a historical perspective, that year. Oh, it was pretty standard stuff at first. We set about constructing a timeline of biblical events, and discussed the history of the Bible itself, while I'd look at my watch and try to calculate the exact number of minutes left in the church calendar I'd have to endure the utter embarrassment of having my parents be the Sunday School teachers. Because after the first few Sunday morning sessions, the other kids were certain to sneer at me on the way to the church service. "Answered all the questions again, didn't you Sunday School boy?"
"Well, you guys wouldn't talk, and they were looking at me! I had to!"
Katy Sweeney, who by telling me as a child that there was no Santa, had inaugurated an entire dozen years of her life spent ensuring I was miserable as possible, showed her utter dedication to her finely-honed craft when she yanked my collar and hissed in my ears, "I've got news for you, Sunday School boy. You parents are booooooorrrrrrring." Katy still nursed a grudge over the time my mother (acting as middle school choir supervisor) marched her out of the sanctuary because she passed notes during the sermon. (I'd nearly cheered.)
"I think it's interesting," I said, knowing no one would believe me.
Katy led the others in laughter. "You probably think your zits and greasy hair are interesting, brainiac." It was useless to point out that my adolescent complexion problem was infinitely less than most of my classmates; in the laws of the teenaged jungle, she who speaks first and loudest is seen as she who speaks the truth.
I didn't tell my mother and father what Katy had said about their class being boring. But they seemed to sense it. Perhaps it was just a feeling they got. Perhaps it was just an undercurrent of malaise in the Sunday morning conversations. Or perhaps it was the sight of fifteen adolescents in their bean bag chairs, staring at the ceiling, eyes closed, some audibly snoring, while they droned on about Old Testament covenants.
Whatever the motivation, they began to spice it up a little, with some frank sex talk. My mother instantly got their attention with the words, "Did you know that in the Old Testament when it says that one person lay with another, it meant they engaged in sexual intercourse? Now, let's look at all the instances of this language in Exodus, shall we?" This was the sort of stuff that their teen-aged audiences wanted to hear, and they became instantly popular. Now instead of "Your parents are booooorrrring," I was more likely to get, "How come you're not as cool as your mom and dad?" But even second-hand respect was still a step up.
My parents led our class through those naughty folk of Sodom and Gomorrah, touched on Jezebel and Bathsheba by way of Mary Magdalene, dipped a little into the Song of Songs, and with their makeover of the Bible into an R-rated saga of sex and sin made themselves so popular that kids who'd abandoned Sunday School long before re-enlisted. Every Sunday morning was so steamy that the room had to be aired afterwards, so the stained glass windows could have a chance to de-fog.
Somehow, however, we worked our way back around to this issue of circumcision. My dim recollection of that fatal morning prompts me to think it had to do with the laws of the Torah. All I know for sure is that one moment my father was talking in clinical tones about circumcision being a requirement under the laws of Moses, and Katy Sweeney asking, in smarmy tones, "Oh, Mrs. Briceland, it's so hard for us girls to ask these questions, but I know you'll tell me . . . what exactly is circumcision?"
"Well!" said my mother, warming up to her subject. "When a boy is born, his penis is enclosed in a sheath of skin. . . ." I sunk down further in my bean bag chair. This frank sex talk stuff always mortified me, no matter how much it delighted my peers. I bet Katy Sweeney wouldn't have enjoyed it so much if her priss of a mother had been the one talking in salacious detail about polygamy in ancient Palestine. ". . . just below the glans, where it heals cleanly," my mother finished. "Nowadays it's believed to inhibit the incidence of penile cancer. That's why when I had Vance, we had him circumcised just days after he was born?"
I froze. Everyone else in the class looked over at me with an expression of horror. I was unfortunately splayed out in one of the uncomfortable bean bag chairs, and I drew my legs together. Someone said, "He's circumcised?"
"Most male babies born in hospitals these days. . . ." My mother continued on, but at this point, no one was listening to her. The other kids were all staring at me. Katy Sweeney's jaw moved from side to side, and gradually her mouth worked into a cruel smile. Thought I tried to show indifference, inwardly I knew that for the rest of the year she and the others would torment me by calling me 'Circumcision Boy.'
It was 'you circumcised geek,' as it turned out, actually. I would never have been so mortified if I'd known all along whether I'd been under the knife. But I'd been too embarrassed to broach the topic, and my fate, ladies and gentlemen, was to get my answer in the most public way possible.
I'm happy to say that my mother, after her liberating experience in the Sunday School class with adolescents who actually expressed their natural curiosity about sex, went on to a stunning career as sexual advisor to my college friends. Not only would she hold forth at great length about the benefits of sex before marriage, but many were the times they'd consult her about other issues, such as the merits of various methods of birth control. She became a walking advertisement for the contraceptive sponge.
It was my peers, ultimately, that redeemed my mother's faith in the tenets of Dr. Spock. Certainly not me. While I was red-faced and silent, they were the ones asking the questions and regarding her with fascination when she'd give the answers. While I was affecting a certain jaded boredom at the mention of certain words, she and my father became the popular ones.
So I might not have been top dog in any particular grade, despite having read Dr. Reuben from cover to cover, at least I had the cool parents. And it might have taken a while, but at least after the circumcision episode I learned to ask questions, even about the embarrassing stuff. I might have been born a boo-boo, after all, but that doesn't mean I have to keep making them.
May 2000
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