“Tell me something I don’t know Mummy?”
It was a warm summer afternoon. I was a skinny six year old, thirsting for knowledge while watching my mother who was preoccupied and struggling to make the beds. When I asked that same annoying question for what seemed to her the hundredth time, she paused, sighed, drew breath and said: “Would you like to know where babies come from?”
I will never know why she chose that particular moment to reveal the full frank facts of human procreation. Was it her desire to get it over with before I reached an age where she would be too embarrassed to tell me? Or perhaps it was an uncharacteristic moment of frustration with my never-ending requests for new knowledge. As I loved my Mother, I prefer to remember it as the act of a brave young woman of the early 1950’s, eager to educate her young son in the fullest sense.
And so she began. I remember feeling the warmth of the sun shining into the room, smell the freshly laundered sheets, and seeing her leaning beside the polished bedroom table as she busily tucked in the bedclothes. But I can remember nothing further except the feeling of: “Whooaaoo!, Too much information!”, as she described the carnal act of sexual intercourse between my dear Mother and my upright Father, though to be fair, she told it in a clean and clinical way. It was just so unexpected, such a big story and so bizarre compared with all the other clickety-click facts that Mum and Dad had told me in the past. I usually knew just where to pigeon-hole everything my parents told me, alongside all the other safe, sterile objective facts in my mind. And frankly, I really didn’t want to have to think about my parents connecting parts of their bodies that I had never been allowed to name, see, or even imagine.
Well, if it was to shut me up, it certainly worked, as I didn’t ask another question all day. I was six, I believed everything my parents told me as I trusted them even more than God. So as the evening wore on, I rehearsed in my mind what I had learned, and attempted to marry it up with anything else that I knew around the topic. This was almost entirely unsuccessful, as what little I did know about the birds and the bees, all seemed to be about gardening. But as I began to realize just how strange my new learnings appeared to be, I grew increasingly excited at the thought of sharing my new knowledge at school the following day. Knowledge is power, so at last I would command some major respect from classmates who’d previously treated me as the skinny geek that I was.
Though my mind was buzzing with further questions, I resisted the urge to seek further clarification from Mother over the breakfast table, fearing huge embarrassment for myself if I did, and set off on my walk to school with a spring in my step. I managed to contain myself until the morning break, then gathered a few classmates, and said: “Hey boys, listen to what I know”.
I told the tale as best I could remember, but instead of the expected hush of awe and respect for which I had hoped, I got titters, laughter followed by loud guffaws. It appeared that on the topic of human procreation, they were all much more knowledgeable than me, for as if in one voice they united in telling me that I had got it WRONG. The truth, it seemed that all but I knew, was that babies were carried into the world in the beak of a large long-legged bird called a Stork.
I felt humiliated, and even smaller than usual among my boisterous classmates, but worse much, much worse, I felt wounded to my very core. For the first time in my life, I knew that my Mother lied to me. Now, from that point on, everything she told me would need to be weighed against others views and thoughts. Was there anyone I could trust to tell me the facts of life, or must I explore the truth of everything for myself?
I never told Mother what had happened at school, but she must have noticed that I was rather withdrawn when I returned that evening. Perhaps she remembered what she had revealed the previous day, and wondered if it had been too soon to teach her little boy about sex? But I had learned something important; that truth is the consensus of the crowd, and trouble comes from listening to strange ideas from lone individuals, especially one who is trusted and loved.
My Mother’s strange tale soon faded in my memory, since it made no sense to me at all, until some years later I began to hear similar stories from older children. Slowly, slowly, it began to dawn on me that she had been right all along, and I felt a little ashamed that I had not trusted her. With hindsight, I learned two things that I would never ever forget: The first, that the truth may be both complicated and uncomfortable. The second; that a shared narrative is a powerful thing, even if it has no grounds in reality.
Excerpt from: Bottleneck -Our human interface with reality