In contrast to today's mores of divulging every single aspect of sex to everyone from four-years-old up, the only sex education we had was when our mothers told us we would be getting a period every month (but not why).
When I was fifteen, and had casually dated a few boys, I met a sixteen-year-old boy, John, who, I thought, was very sexy. At least I gathered that, because when we "necked" I got feelings that I had never had before. Having gone to a Catholic school all of our lives, and believing strongly that we would go to hell if we had sex before marriage, we confined ourselves to petting. That was lots of fun, but we wanted to be able to "go all the way", so we planned a wedding.
We were married a month after my nineteen birthday, and a month before John's nineteenth. At that time, the girl could marry at 18, but the boy had to get a parent's consent if under 21, so John's father went with us to city hall. Our parents tried to tell us we were too young, but of course, we did not pay any attention to them, especially since Nat "King" Cole had a hit song that played wherever we went. He crooned, "They tried to tell us we're too young, but we were not too young at all." All of the movies ala Doris Day, June Allyson, etc. were about hanging on to your virginity by hook or by crook, until you hooked the guy. Elizabeth Taylor, my idol, had a movie about her fairytale wedding in "Father of the Bride" and my goal was to look exactly like her. Copying her hair style and finding a wedding dress which I thought was more beautiful than hers was as close as I came, oddly enough..
I had a lot of fun planning a huge wedding (300 guests). It was the first time I was able to act like a woman, not a teenager, ( I thought I would never get out of that unpleasant, uncertain stage.) But there were certain things I still did not know. My girlfriend Rosemary had told me when we were 10 that her grandmother told her that we could get babies by, "Letting the man put his thing in a hole in your bottom", which really freaked both of us out. It took a long time to become reconciled to our fate.
It was about a month before our November wedding and I went for a walk in the park with my friend from work, Joyce, who was much more sophisticated than I. She was a divorcee at 24, and had a child. These things were practically unheard of in our Catholic part of Chicago then. I knew she could provide me with the answer to a question that I dare not ask anyone else. So, taking a deep breath, I asked, "Joyce, one thing I don't understand, how does the baby get out of the belly-button?" When she got up, after rolling around on the grass, laughing, she clued me in. Thank God, or when I got pregnant a few months later, I would have been worrying about my belly button for 9 months!
Well, we had a wonderful wedding and raised three great kids, and were married for 46 years, until John died in 2000. I guess today's "clued in" children will never face such uncertainity, but it seems to me that their innocence is taken away from them as soon as they reach 4 or 5. Absolutely nothing is kept from them, and I can't help thinking that our society is impoverished by, "letting it all hang out". What do you think?
