Okay so to set the scene, we are living at the farm, and I am eight, maybe nine years-old. It is spring, I think, and we are, as a family, cleaning up an area around and near the garage and gas pump, a metal hand-cranked thing left-over from the actual farm-farming days; I love and miss this antique pump to this day, no matter how inconvenient it was, because in my opinion it was very, very cool! But I digress. There were branches lying about, weeds too, and we were all doing our thing to make the patch around the pump, near our dirt road driveway’s end, nice again. Maybe there had been a wind storm or something. But, we were all outside, together, participating in an activity of rural life (or whatever), notable for all of those aspects alone. But wait, there’s more.
At that tender age, what I knew, had learned, or been told about the female body – my own body – was almost nothing. Nothing. I remember being chastised one Easter for looking at the girdle ads in a Monkey Wards catalogue with my brother and younger sister (‘Giggling, laughing, at those photos, while Jesus is dying for your sins on the cross!!‘, my mother said), but other than that, and the covers of girlie magazines in my dad’s store, which were positioned way above my head, I knew nothing. Nada. Nyet.
I did know I was supposed to be a virgin until I married. I knew that there were good girls and bad girls, good women (married) and bad (unmarried, fast, or loose – whatever those terms actually meant), and I knew I better be a good girl except – well, that horse had already left the barn, right? Except it wasn’t a horse, it was the giant elephant in the room, the bruise on my little girl mind and soul, one I would ignore for decades because – survival comes first, y’all, and while denial might not just be a river in Egypt, disassociation is very real, and very, very powerful.
All to say that at eight or nine, what I didn’t know about my own body was a lot. And ignorance was not and never is bliss, in my view, but it can be damnably hilarious at times. But. And. However – children aren’t stupid, I certainly wasn’t, but what I also was – and all children are, was deeply imaginative, and hints of this and that and what bad stuff could happen (and in fact had happened) in the land of supposedly blissful ignorance, those hints and inferences were imagined into even larger boogie-men. And, in this instance, what I didn’t know anything about that made for future hilarity but late 1960’s terror, was pubic hair. Pubic hair.
Yup. Pubic hair. Did I even know such a thing existed? Had I ever seen an adult male or female naked? Nope. Or, if I had, I had certainly blanked it out. So, on this spring day of extremely rare familial comity in the great outdoors, I was just doing my thing, bending over to pick up sticks and pull weeds, when I happened to look up, and up happened to be up my mother’s denim wrap skirt. It also happened that she was not wearing underwear. And, I am not shitting you, I thought a rat or something had gone up her skirt and I completely panicked. I kept my mouth shut, however, deciding to look again because if it were a rat or mouse – my mother would be screaming her head off, right? She hated and feared mice and all other critters with all her might. So, I bent over and peeked again, and this time – not panicking – I took a longer look. Oh, I think that is my mother. And she’s hairy – yeesh. Gross!! Why would you have hair on your lower parts? Is it just her?! Gosh, I hope so. Please don’t tell me it’s on everyone. It can’t be! Sheesh.
I did not look again.
Again, I said nothing. I vaguely recall asking someone – lord knows who – about hair on private parts, but it is also possible this never happened and that for educational purposes, I may have (I’m realizing as I write this that this is much more likely by a factor of about a billion) grabbed a nudie magazine without my dad seeing me one slow day at the store, and learned ‘independently’ what the exterior of adult female private parts looked like.
Still, I will never forget or stop laughing over the fear and shock and horror I felt that day, just helping out over-here, and WHATTHEFUCKINGHELLISTHAT – only in child me words, ‘Ohmigosh, what IS that?! There’s a mouse/rat/woodchuck/woodland creature up my mom’s skirt!!
Nope. That, gentle reader, was my mother’s Beaver. Snatch. Bush. Crotch. Box. Mons Venus. Groin. Rug. I remember learning that – or rather the term ‘rug muncher’ – in a 1980s British film, Withnail and I, maybe? Sammie and Rosie Get Laid? Learning independently once started, never ends.