Some statement on the bus today made me think about this topic though I cannot recall what that was. It just made me smile and remember a story which I’d like to share.
I was raised bilingual which means that at home we spoke Danish and outside we spoke English. My mother is a very conservative, reserved sort of person and in contrast my father was a very ebullient guy. Being Scandinavian the conversation at the dinner table could get risqué, according to Canadian standards, but my father’s rationale (as he told me when I was much older) was that because he knew Mom wouldn’t talk to us girls about sex he felt it was necessary to bring it out into the open. Therefore while he was carving up the chicken on a Sunday afternoon he would mention things like the fact that our mother laid an egg once a month. Imagine the scars I carry to this day over that very visual information! Somewhere along this line of talk the sexual act was brought up, all in Danish, of course. It was fairly blunt and to the point, nothing fancy.
Flash forward from age 7 to age 12 when Jeanette and I are having a talk with our friend Heidi (yes the infamous “do you like Heidi” friend). She is bursting with news. Her mother has just told her about :”the birds and the bees”. Naturally, I had never heard of this saying so when she asked if we knew about the story of the birds and the bees we shook our heads. Then she whispered “it’s about sex”. Well, talk about being disappointed! I had expected something like, oh a jungle adventure or Disney movie or even a Hitchcock horror story.
“We already know about that.” We shrugged, not even being blasé about it as we didn’t think it was anything extraordinary to talk about. This was ordinary Sunday dinner table talk after all.
Heidi wanted to get the upper hand and prove that we weren’t telling the truth. She asked us if we knew what “a boy’s thing is called”. Well, we were stumped. Because we didn’t know the English word for it. To this day I feel that Heidi never believed us when we said we knew all about sex simply because we did not know the word “penis”. Furthermore, we never did hear the story of the birds and the bees.
Years later, when I was in my early thirties, I was having some sort of talk with my dad and it led into the story of Heidi and her whispered confidence about “the birds and the bees”. I asked my dad if he knew what the story of the birds and the bees was. He looked at me blankly.
“Actually, I’m not sure how that story would go.”
I looked at him and burst out laughing and he started to laugh too. To this day, I still don’t know the story of the birds and the bees! Someone will have to explain how Canadian parents tell the story of sex using birds and bees.
Awesome.
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