So yes. Obama. Several times over.
And now ...
Your reward for having tolerated the last year-plus of this voting season (insert horribly inappropriate sportsman joke here) is this story, the complete accuracy of which I have secured from my mother, from whom I get my convincing ability to accidentally lie about a lot. (Ask me about Chaucer's middle name some time.)
It is a scientifically observed and proven fact that church for kids is intensely boring.
Reason: It isn't supposed to be exciting for kids. It's supposed to test the faith of their parents, who wonder why in the hell they decided to have kids, then remember how much fun making them was, how much loot they got from their relatives, friends and co-workers in the process, and how nice it is to pawn the little ones off on grandparents and go try to make another (little one, not grandparent).
But seriously. Many churches have nurseries, which largely consist of two (sometimes three) very patient volunteers and a bunch of infants and toddlers who are not scheduled to be changed until at least two whole minutes after every car in the parking lot is involved in the weekly after-Mass traffic jam.
Your diarist, unfortunately, was not so lucky as to get to skip out on Mass in favor of playing with other people's toys.
No, back in the 1980s, when your friendly neighborhood diarist was A) young (4 1/3, as my mother relates the story) and B) still going to church for occasions other than his sister's wedding, his mind needed things to occupy it. (This is still the case; I am flighty, and I get bored very quickly. That Today in History managed to go two whole months amazed me.) And if his mind was unoccupied, his parts started moving about, his voice started acting up (in the talking sense, not the Exorcist sense) and folks around him got the sense that he needed something to occupy himself with, since the finer points of canon law and the Council of Nicaea and its importance to the Rite of Mass were not quite up there on the list of "Things I can think about that will unborify me."
It was a struggle for about an hour and 15 minutes every Sunday -- or, in 4 1/3-year-old time, approximately 15 years. The stand-up sit-down part, the turning of pages (a very adult thing to do) and the singing ... these were the fun parts. Memorizing the action bits was fun, but as in football, for every five seconds of action, there were at least three years (in 4-year-old time) of
just
sitting
around
waiting
.
To say that it was boring would be an insult to professional grass-watchers and paint dryness technicians.
One Sunday Mass in February or March 1986, little iampunha was for some reason (I don't remember this, so I have no idea why) fixated on the finer points of human reproduction.
Now, when you are 4, the finer points of human reproduction consist of, generally, points about as fine as the blade on a butter knife -- sharp enough to cut things asking for it, but nowhere near bad enough to do real damage unless you try so hard your hand hurts from gripping it.
My parents had explained some to me -- before you get alarmed, it was barely past stork territory. "A mama and a daddy get together in a special way, and nine months later -- in your case, almost 10 -- a baby comes out." (My parents were not mom and dad but Mama and Daddy, thus the name specifics. At 27, I still use those names. ... why would I change?)
This was actually a pretty sophisticated understanding for a 4-year-old (and based on my volunteering and college experience, you could quintuple that age bracket and it'd still be pretty competitive knowledge). I knew that actual people were involved in making other people, which made sense -- the stork bit (which I heard later on) only made me wonder why kids didn't then ask where the storks got the babies. Were they stork babies? Were there people making babies, Brave New World-style, with varying qualities of blood surrogate?
See, these are the questions (minus the book reference) I would have had as a 4-year-old about the stork explanation, which works wonderfully until your 15-year-old teenage daughter has made you a grandmother because nobody bothered to tell her that semen is more than icky -- it makes things that emit far ickier substances.
But alas, my parents' firstborn (hi!) was not quite so easily appeased. (I also wanted some of Czechoslovakia, but apparently bad things had happened the last time someone had negotiated for it.) And combined with this lack of appeasement (though without the "I don't know the answer!" ravings of Kevin James) was the very thorough and obvious pregnancy of his mother, who would give birth a few months later to the aforementioned sister.
But in March 1986, baby Charlotte (not her real name) was, to the casual observer, not more than a very pronounced protrusion in my mother's abdomen -- a motile thing, given to the sort of interactions most kids enjoy ("I can't see what's kicking when I poke, but this is fun!" "OK, Mama's tired of having you play peekaboo with baby Charlotte, and her uterus needs to take a break from the Rockettes practice.") with the unborn. But still, after a fashion, a bit of a mystery, because kids initially don't believe in things they can't see. (Then they believe in lots of things they can't see.)
And little iampunha needed some reassurance, I think, about just how baby Charlotte had gotten in there.
And since I also needed something to occupy my mind -- and since Mass was clearly not going to be over until some time after I had outgrown my clothes -- I tugged on my mother's sleeve, or something, and she bent over, quietly asked, "What?" and I said, very quietly because we were in church:
"Where did Charlotte come from?"
I don't know if my mother understood that whispering would have muddied the response or if she just didn't think of it at the time, but the answer came out quite clearly, "Your Daddy and I got together in a special way, and a baby started to grow in my tummy."
Not entirely accurate, but this was, as my mother has explained to me many times since, )(*#%^*)(#%^ Mass, not a bloody gosh darn Show and Tell highlight reel.
My response to her showed that I had understood this information and was ready for 4-year-old biology camp. I am fortunate that diaries can be long, because this is quite the communicative utterance to convey:
"Oh. OK."
Now, It's a funny thing about kids (and people in general): Once you give them a certain level of information on a certain issue, subsequent discussions must come at least very close to that level of information. This is the basis for personal sharing in relationships and for illumination with professionals in various fields, from medical appointments to news broadcasts.
This is also the case if you have entrusted specific medical knowledge to a child perfectly able to understand reasonably advanced biology -- but who then requires that this level of communication be maintained for future such discussions. The reasons are many and various (and pretty interesting if you're a cultural anthropologist), ranging from shared experiences to verifying information and reinforcing trust, and the always important "I heard at school that ..." -- which is the parent's cue to jump in and assure the child that no, his (in this case) shirt does not make him look poor.
And if you have decided that, by golly, you are not going to hide information from your kids, it means you have committed to having to know (or dig up) information on a shitload of subjects.
Including human reproduction.
And little iampunha had, at the tender age of 4, gotten some reasonably detailed information on the genesis of people who were four years younger than he.
And he wanted to confirm it, by golly. He wanted DETAILS! He wanted to share in the superiority of his knowledge over that of those who ... frankly, had parents who were uninterested in raising self-aware kids who would not know what to avoid doing.
(14-year-old girl: "But what if you really, really like a guy, and --"
Abstinence teacher: "Just wait until you're married."
14yo: "But what if you REALLY like--"
AT: "Just wait. It'll be better--"
14yo: "But what if you're totally in love?"
AT: "You're not. You're 14. It's hormones."
Other 14yo: "Call it whatever you want, but you're talking about biology versus 'Don't do that.' Which side do you think is going to win?"
AT: "The side that doesn't want to get pregnant and believes it's morally wrong to use condoms."
14yo: "How do you use a condom?"
AT: "You don't. You wait until you're married."
Some time later:
15-year-old girl: "Mom, I'm scared. I like this guy, and we were out together, and before we knew it ...")
So he tugged on his mother's sleeve again, and this time she was not as interested in the distraction from what was becoming the consecration.
"What?" she asked not so quietly and not so nicely.
"Yes, but WHERE did baby Charlotte come from?"
"Your Daddy and I got together in a special way, and a baby started to grow in my tummy."
This was not going to do. This would not stand. These outrages were not going to be forgotten, nor were they going to be tolerated.
I beseeched my mother once more for further information. She passed me off to my father, using the immortal words "Ask your daddy. He's a
nurse."
He had the medical knowledge and, besides, my mother was not intent on addressing 4-year-old biology time but the consecration.
The consecration, for those of you who have no idea, is ... how to explain this to folks with no concept of Catholicism.
Take something sacred (in the general sense, not the religious sense) to you. Voting. Getting a promotion. A moment of life's clarity and worth -- something important, but not unique so much as very deeply meaningful.
This is about as analogous as I can make the consecration. It is the finale of the spiritual journey of taking and preparing the host for consumption -- not as grain-based food but as the commitment of the parish to the continuation of the faith on a public and private level.
Religiously, it is the moment (Catholics believe) at which the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ.
Kind of important to the Mass. If memory serves, you can't have a Mass without one. You can have a songless Mass, a Mass with no sitting down, standing up or anything like that, but the consecration is kind of like democracy and government: The one requires the other.
And it's kind of hard to explain except by saying that you could hear someone thinking about dropping a pin in most Catholic churches (I haven't experienced a consecration anywhere else) during the consecration.
And in this church, in the most popular weekend service, with 800+ people anticipating this moment, ...
I asked my father where baby Charlotte had come from, and once more I got the base, the crude, the "this is information to my friends, BUT NOT TO ME!" explanation that frankly made reproduction seem like just a very adult hug behind closed doors. Yeah, sure, it was the consecration (which I did not even come close to understanding -- in terms of the significance, whatever -- except that I was supposed to be quiet) but my question was important too, Mama and Daddy!
I do not remember any of this story on my own. Partly that is because I was quite young, and partly that is because I don't remember much of anything from before about ... 10 years ago. (The human mind is blessedly good at putting painful memories where you have to try quite hard to retrieve them.)
But I am pretty sure that my 4-year-old self was rather annoyed at this dismissive and woefully inadequate answer. The temperament that is unhappy when people try to withhold information like so much water in a sponge begging to drip was not somehow invented in me three months before I arrived here, or even three years.
I've always been one of those people who, given the answer to question A (or Q, or A.56), wants more.
And so just as the Mass had reached its spiritual pinnacle -- the priest had lifted the host up quite high, and there was a dramatic silence (though many parts of the Mass are silent but for the very young ones' pleas for attention, the occasional cough, etc.) -- I expressed my frustration in an entirely justified format:
"But Daddy, I wanna hear about the SPERM!"
Mortification. Newly married adults died on the spot. (One hopes they had some fun of it first.) There was a collective shuffle and a few thuds as heads (not mere jaws but full-blown bodies) hit the floor.
Grandparents and veteran parents smiled knowingly, realizing that while they had escaped THAT particular moment of drama for themselves, they'd experienced it before and it was happening again.
Miles away, nuns in their cloisters randomly blushed. So did abstinence teachers.
Dan Quayle was speechless. Candice Bergen wondered what the big deal was.
My parents were, to their everlasting credit, amused.
And I did not, for all my protestations, get to hear about the sperm until at LEAST after Mass.