Papa, Where Do Babies Come From?
It was late winter or early spring, I cannot recall the exact season. Our parents had just told us that Mama was going to have a baby that summer. We were curious. ‘’Where is the baby now?’’ we asked.
‘’In her stomach,’’ we were told.
We had to mull that thought over. After a few days, finally one morning, as the driver was dropping Nora and me off at school, before he took Papa to his office, I ventured to ask, ‘’Papa, where do babies come from and how did the baby get into Mama’s stomach?’’
Papa was definitely the wrong person to ask this question of. He went into precise, succinct details answering my questions! Intricate details! Nora and I were stunned. Our heads were spinning. At our tender age, it was hard to comprehend what he said. We could not concentrate on our classes that day. Our diet of information until then did not include the graphic description of how babies were made. We had been raised on a steady diet of ‘once upon a time,’ and ‘happily ever after.’ This strayed so far away from what we were used to, it stunned our young minds.
We consulted with each other and agreed that Papa was saying some awful dirty things! We were quite upset and could not understand why he had said something so horrible. We were just glad he had not said that in front of our little sister, Gilda. She was way too little, and we did not want to tell Mama what he had said. We did not want to upset her, especially as everyone was fussing over her because of the new baby in her stomach.
We came to the agreement that we had to tell Mama’s older sister, Tantie Marcelle, the next time we had the opportunity. We did not have long to wait. The very next day, by some fortuitous chance, Mama dropped us three sisters at Tantie’s house. She needed to run some errands then come back and visit with her sister.
Tantie has four sons. Two are older than me, one is approximately Nora’s age and one a bit younger than Gilda. Tantie gathered us all around her dining table. She was giving us a ‘grown-up’ tea! That consisted of a tall glass of warm milk with a dash of tea and hot buttered bread sprinkled with Demerara sugar! The height of grown-up elegance, in our opinion. She had laid out scrumptious cheese toasts and delicious cakes which she had baked. Another day we would have been delighted by the spread. That day Nora and I had other things on our minds. As we sat down to our tea, Nora and I exchanged glances. That was my cue to speak.
“Tante,” I began. “Papa said something horrible yesterday. It was very dirty.’’
The boys perked up. They sensed something interesting coming up.
‘’What did your Papa say?’’ Tantie asked absently as she plied us with more food.
As I spoke, the room fell silent. Tantie stopped feeding us. She carefully folded her hands upon her lap and listened attentively as I told my sordid tale. The older boys, Shaul and Elias, had a chagrined look upon their faces. My cousin Jacky’s eyes had turned into huge round saucers of disbelief. Ricky seemed too young to comprehend what I was saying. The only sound, except my voice, was the sound of the steam in the kettle on top of the portable kerosene heater, gently humming along.
When I finished speaking there was a momentary silence. We children waited for Tantie’s reaction. At last, she spoke.
‘’Your Papa was not being dirty or nasty.’’
’’What do you mean, Tantie?” I asked, hesitantly.
’’That is how babies are made,” she firmly said.
“You mean this is TRUE?” I asked incredulously.
All eyes turned upon her. We waited for her to negate that statement. Instead, she said, “It is true.”
There was a stunned silence. I was barely nine years old then and Nora is eighteen months younger than me. It was an unforgettable way to learn about the birds and the bees. I do not think that any of us forgot that day.
Years passed. I got married and had my own children. A friend of mine came for a visit. She was quite pregnant. It was her first child. My children were then around four and a half and three years old. They followed her wherever she went, and she allowed them. One day she was taking a bath. My two followed her into the bathroom and just carried on a conversation with her as she bathed. Her big tummy seemed to be bobbing up and down above the bathwater, a round shiny globe. That seemed to fascinate them.
Afterward, they asked, ‘’Mummy, how did the baby get into Auntie’s stomach?’’
“Uncle planted a seed into her,” I said.
“And how will the baby come out?” was the next question.
I quickly thought of an answer, “There is an invisible zipper in all mummies’ stomachs. When the baby is ready to come out, the doctor will pull the zipper down and take the baby out.”
That seemed to satisfy them. And there you have it, I had just thought up another explanation of the tale of the birds and the bees. It was a gentler version than the one Papa told us and quite digestible to the young mind.