I remember the first birth I ever saw. They fed the mother-to-be some whiskey. They put a stick in her mouth. And she made a face that looked like she was releasing a bowel movement the size of the Houston civic center.
Never mind that I was only seven years old. Never mind that I was seeing this surrounded by strangers. Never mind that this was the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner.
None of that matters. No, I was seeing childbirth for the first time and when they held up the blueberry alien that supposed to be a child, I was appalled.
Walking out of the theater, the caramel from my milk duds still stuck in my teeth, I asked my mom:
“Is it true mother? Do children really come out of buttholes?”
When I got home from church on Sunday my father summoned me to the living room. I sat down.
He told me that we needed to have a talk. I asked him if we could go play basketball.
He said he wanted to tell me about how babies were born. I told him I wanted to go play basketball.
After numerous attempts to leave, he finally settled me down and handed me a book called How Babies Are Born.
Then he left.
It was just me in the living room. Just me and How Babies Are Born. Just me, How Babies are born and the living room.
Wanting to put off reading this book at all costs I started to look around the room that I had been in all of four times in my entire life. My three-year old portrait hung over the mantle. My brother’s was to the left. There were fake pinecones on top of a table and an antique clock that didn’t work resting on top of books that no one read. The carpet was spotless and everything was stiff as if the room’s lack of human interaction had resulted in rigor mortis.
I had never known the purpose for this room. Before today, I thought it was just a place to have conversations with the geriatric – a room void of technology that wouldn’t confuse people who wanted to talk about when cars didn’t have seatbelts and that one time they saw the president on the back of train.
But there I was. Sitting in my family’s own little funeral room holding a book titled How Babies are Born. Since seven year olds do not appreciate irony, my soul was flushed with unnamable awkwardness when I contemplated the notion of handing my father the book back.
I played the scene out in my head.
I would walk back in the kitchen hand him the book. They would ask if I read it. I would say yes. Then, a giant monster would come out of the disposal in the sink and consume my family.
I would walk back in the kitchen hand him the book. They would ask if I read it. I would say yes. Then, the oven would start sucking our house into an airless vacuum.
I would walk back in the kitchen hand him the book. They would ask if I read it. I would say yes. Then, I would explode.
How could I get away from this?
“I just won’t read the book,” I thought. That way nothing bad can happen. I could just walk in the kitchen, hand them the book and say, “yeah, I know what happens. You hike into the woods, put a stick in a girl’s mouth and a baby comes out of a butthole. Big deal. Dad, I didn’t even need that book. I have seen Robin Hood you know.”
But something in my mind told me that there was a reason I was in this room. Something told me that maybe, even though I was seven, I might not have all the answers.
So I looked at the book. What struck me first were the illustrations, done in colored pencil and charcoal. The major color scheme can best be remembered as “pretty much magenta”. It was very eighties. None of the characters had faces. It was just vague sketches of figures seamlessly intertwined with captions that talked about how it all went down.
It walked me through the steps. I saw the faceless colored-pencil man dash in and out of scenes. The faceless colored-pencil woman was always wearing some kind of toga. I couldn’t really tell what was going on. Magenta. Everywhere.
Finally, after painfully careful language set up the scene, faceless colored-pencil man knocked up faceless colored-pencil woman.
Although I wasn’t sure the exact biology that was involved in the interaction, now, I was pretty sure that you didn’t need a stick or whiskey to get a woman pregnant.
The book wasn’t exactly clear, but I did take mostly positive lessons away from it.
On the last page it had a picture of an infant, with its nose and eyes barely visible. It said, “and this is what happens when two people love each other.” I remember thinking to myself, “at least their baby is going to have a face.”
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