A Portnoy's Complaint Sex Education

Some days current events become just too much for me.  The feds can’t charge that killer white supremacist kid in Buffalo with domestic terrorism even though he admitted to it.  Why?  Domestic terrorism isn’t against the law!  A bill just passed the House but only Kinzinger of the red party voted in favor of it.  The rest of the Rethugs are against it.  I bet it fails in the Senate.  Naturally.  Even better:  killer kid learned all about making his weapon from YouTube videos that are still available.  Are you effin kidding me?

In Oklahoma, unless a woman has been raped (and reported it) or whose life is in danger (medically documented) abortions will be illegal “from the moment of conception.”  Just when you think Rethuglicans can’t go any lower than soullessly voting against helping parents get formula or getting fast aid to Ukraine and on and on and on, they do this.

Civil war, here we come.  I’ve seen it speculated it might be a battle-free civil war.  States will stay together for things like budgets and so on but will otherwise ignore each other.  That's just a little less screwy than taking up arms against each other.

See?  My mind is blown.

So, what shall I write about instead?

How about an amusing little memory from my junior high years?

Some mothers have “the talk” with their daughters.  Mine didn’t.  First there was a language barrier.  I’ve written before that my mother went to an oral school for the Deaf, Lexington, in NYC in the 30s-40s.  The school was strictly using the oral method.  My mother and my aunt, Mom’s sister, learned that sign language was nasty and wrong.  They were forever warped by that lesson drummed into their heads.

Mom refused to sign to my brother and me, and she made my father go along with her.  Dad reluctantly agreed.  He wasn’t profoundly deaf like Mom was and his speech was understandable.  Further, his family and school totally supported use of sign language and "home signs".  We communicated with lip reading, a tedious and frustrating process for the four of us.  My brother and I often resorted to pantomime and fingerspelling, much to Mom's embarrassment.

On top of that, Mom was embarrassed by “that stuff” although she and my Dad had a healthy sex life.  Fortunately, she did warn me as I entered puberty that I was going to have a “monthly” and when it happened, I should let her know.  My younger cousin wasn’t so lucky.  My aunt was too mortified to discuss it and so one day the poor kid shrieked from the bathroom that she was dying.  She wasn’t.  She’d just gotten her period.

At that time, there wasn’t much sex education in school.  When I started junior high, Mom figured it was time I get the facts but not from her.  One day I found a book called Portnoy’s Complaint on my pillow.  I was an avid reader and guessed this must be a good book Mom wanted to share with me.  She was an avid reader too.

What an eye opener.  I was absolutely thrilled by everything I learned from that book.  I decided I would share all I learned with my best friends and brought the book to school.  It was an eye opener for them too.  Our stifled giggles got the attention of our neighbors who asked to have a peek.  Class was going on so this was accomplished with notes and gestures.  Soon Portnoy’s Complaint was making the rounds of boys and girls alike.  Everyone tried to be discreet, holding the book in their laps while acting like they were doing the assignment.

One of the boys began snorting, though,  and the teacher, who’d been getting suspicious we weren’t writing essays, confiscated the book and about dropped dead.  He wanted to know whose book it was.  I raised my hand and became the most popular kid in the class for the rest of the year.  I was sent to the office, along with the book.

The principal was properly impressed.  He was going to call my parents and I broke the news they couldn’t hear.  He dictated a letter instead.  That made me very nervous.  My mom was rather emotionally unstable and I figured she was going to blow a gasket.  To my surprise, she read the letter, turned tomato red, grabbed the book and went to her bedroom.  I never saw that copy of it again.  However, as soon as I could get to a bookstore, I bought one for myself and hid it in my room.

A few weeks later, I found another book on my pillow: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask.  I learned a lot more from that book but felt it was too dry to pass around to my friends.  Everything was presented so clinically, textbook fashion.  BOR-ing.