Tongue Tied

Is it just me, or is every kid having sex?

Every single place I live as a pre-preadolescent comes well stocked with children my age who want to have sex. Never penetrative. Always secret. The lack of emotional mortification we all feel is confusing to me now in an age where all such behavior is regarded as evidence of something sexually evil going on in the home. As bizarre as my childhood is, no one diddles me without me initiating it. Deep down I think it might be less harmful than everyone on "Oprah" wants us to believe.

I know I seriously undermine that statement in my last blog by pointing to the six year-old girl's vaginal ointment as evidence of something not right in her household.

For a while for me as a kid it is pretty evenly divided between girls and boys, but somewhere around the age of about eight or nine my sex play begins to get more exclusively male. And insertive. In Hawaii where we live when I am briefly in the third grade, two slightly older boys meet up with me every afternoon after school. There is usually some pretense of talk about how we are doing this only because there were no girls around who are similarly inclined, which I go along with, preserving their fantasy of normality, even though it seems perfectly silly to me even then.

One of them asks if I want to kiss, and I don't yet know how to do it properly. His saliva is a little acrid. I don't see the point of having his tongue in my mouth when it could be put to such better use elsewhere. A friend of my father's from Blanco, Texas, visits us, bringing his wife and his son, who enthusiastically make our sex play into a foursome - the son, not the father or his wife. One night in the bedroom he is sharing with me, the son wants to play and I am tired. He grins and says if I don't do what he wants he could tell my father what we are up to. It isn't coercive and he really is kidding, but this is the first time it strikes me that some people might consider what we are doing wrong. Maybe that's a little disingenuous. I must have an instinct that it won't be looked upon favorably, otherwise why keep it a secret? But mainly I don't see it as any big deal.

As I mention 2,899,431 times in earlier blogs, there is nothing coy about sex in our family. A plumber points to my step-mother's pregnant bump when she is carrying the kid that is born after my sister, Betsy. The plumber asks Betsy, then about four, whether she knows that her mommy has a baby in her stomach. Betsy snorts as derisively as a four year-old knows how to do. "That's dumb. It isn't in her stomach, it's in her uterus. She didn't eat the baby!"