I Can't Complain Read Online Free PDF

Beneath that were three paragraphs on puberty, including a sentence that got his attention: “Body changes in adolescence turn girls into young women who can have babies and boys into young men who can make women pregnant.” That there was a connection between boys and babies had apparently never occurred to Ben. “How,” he asked, incredulous, “do men make women pregnant?”
    I, the evolved parent at child rearing’s sacred crossroads, said, “Um. Let’s go ask Daddy.” And then, to prove it was science rather than cowardice, added, “He’s a doctor.”
    Daddy was watching TV. I repeated Ben’s question. My husband said in a voice I didn’t hear very often—therapeutic, pedagogical, Fred Rogers—“Well . . . sure. I can answer that. Do you want to sit down?”
    And truly, Planned Parenthood could have videotaped his presentation and distributed it: the penis, the vagina, the sperm, the egg—logically, calmly, no smirking. Ben listened and didn’t interrupt. When Bob finished, Ben asked—not coyly but suspiciously—“How does the seed get in there? Remote control?”
    Bob said no. The man puts his penis
into
the woman’s vagina.
    After a few moments of contemplation, Ben asked, “Do you have to get naked to do this?”
    Bob said yes, you did.
    “Did you and Mom get naked?”
    Bob said, “I believe we did.”
    Our son stood up, exited the room, and yelled from the kitchen, “I’m never doing that.”
    We waited for his return and his follow-up questions. I said, “That was excellent. You couldn’t have done better.”
    “We’ll see,” said Bob.
    A few days later, at the kitchen table, Ben asked me as casually as he could, without looking up from his breakfast, “How do girls get pregnant?”
    I said, “Ben! You remember! Daddy told you the whole story two nights ago.”
    His tone changed to one of weary tolerance, as if I were the one who needed the refresher. “Yeah, yeah, I know: the man takes a seed out of his tush, and the woman eats it.”
    Well, why not? It had its own charm, and I was learning something valuable: one shouldn’t push the facts of life too early. I’d like to think I corrected his misapprehension on the spot, but I don’t remember doing so. Nor do I remember his coming to us for more sex education.
    School took the next step, a unit named Human Growth and Development, formerly known as Human Growth and Change, amended after someone (this was a lab school at Smith College) worried that the word “change” could traumatize. The boys and girls were separated for the classes; the boys got (I swear) Mr. Weiner, an experienced and married sixth-grade teacher. Fifth grade proved to be good timing, developmentally, because Ben would study his vocabulary list without snickering. Again, Bob did the quizzing. “Vulva?” I heard him ask evenly from the next room, to which Ben would answer, equally clinically, “The external genital organs of the female.”
    “Vas deferens?”
    “The main duct that carries semen.”
    When Bob said, “Clitoris?” I took a step closer.
    “Female organ of pleasure,” our ten-year-old answered as matter-of-factly as if the topic were cotton gin and Eli Whitney. The vocabulary was in place, though not always the idiom: a few months later he reported to his father that he had seen two Smith students outside Davis Hall “doing foreplay.”
    I asked a friend with a daughter-classmate, “How was Human Growth and Development for the girls?”
    “I had to straighten her out on something,” she told me. The girls were shown a video about boys and erections. Someone or something sexy appeared in front of the actors, a row of teenage boys, camera aimed at their backs rather than their faces or their pants. As a result, the fifth-grade girls deduced that sexual stimuli caused boys to stand at attention: an erection was all in the shoulder blades.
    Section two of Human Growth and Development was coed, a year later in the spring of sixth grade. I