I realize I have inadvertently kept a secret.
Something sent me back to an early, early blog post, seventeen years ago, in which I talk about secrets. The last secret is about my childhood confusion about the mechanics of sex, and how I used my art skills to try to figure out how the male and female reproductive systems connected. It ends with this.
So, I sketched out the machinery that must have been required for two people to get together. They were quite the Rube Goldberg devices, with giant wheels and sliding trays and ramps and such. Because God knows two people couldn’t just be expected to walk up to each other and connect their body parts in that way without special assistance of some kind. Sadly for the sake of human sexuality, my inventions were always torn into the trash. I don’t think my parents ever got their hands on any of my artwork, and if they did I do NOT want to know.
Only … that’s a lie. Dad indeed found that artwork. Dad was technically my stepdad, so that makes it a bit touchy, especially because he found it amusing. So amusing he asked me for additional sketches on the same subject. Mom found those sketches in Dad’s possession, and whereas Dad found it hilarious he had evidence of my confusion on the penis-vagina connection topic (how? how?), Mom was livid and demanded he apologize to me.
Why did I lie about it on the blog? Mom was alive when I posted that: that’s my only guess to why I doctored the story. Anyway, as they say when lies are caught out, I apologize for any confusion this might have caused. Now I feel the need to fact-check every word of this blog, or at least all the words until Mom died.
(Later: done. All accurate but for that.)