“Mama, where do
babies come from?”
“Well
shug, when two people love each other very much, they share a special hug -
that’s called fucking – and if they do it right (or if they pay enough to an
adoption agency or a fertility clinic that does artificial insemination), they
have a baby. A screaming, soulless,
pooping machine called a baby. Does that
answer your question?”
Laughing
ensued.
That
is not a conversation I have ever had with my mother. In fact, the “where do babies come from” talk
was dealt with by my dad just about as awkwardly as Amanda Bynes’ father deals
with it in Sidney White. My dad is not a plumber, so I did not have
the benefit of a 3D model made of sink fixtures. Instead, I was given a few books with
cartoons of smiling sperm and ended up figuring it out for myself. No, the conversation above is the short, less
profane version of my now famous “Mama Lauren Birds/Bees Talk” that I have
jokingly given to my friends, more specifically, the group of my friends that
calls me “Mama Lauren”.
¢ ¤ ¢
My childhood was full
of fantastical creatures. My childhood
was full of epic battles between good and evil.
And my childhood was primarily spent alone.
My mother is the kind
of woman who believed whole-heartedly that she was around for my
childhood. She was not. Every other week she traveled from New York’s
John F. Kennedy Airport to London’s Heathrow because she was the CEO of a
multinational national corporation that placed nurses in the commonwealth
countries. She made sure you knew
that. The weeks she did not spend in
London were indeed spent at home; but she was, and is, a woman very susceptible
to jetlag, so she was usually asleep by 6 PM.
From the time of my very earliest memories, my dad was the parent who
came to my school functions and to parent coffees. And he was the one who told me stories. Stories like “The Incredible Shrinking
Meatloaf”. At the time I thought it was
just a hilarious recollection of his college years, but now I think there was,
in fact, a moral to a story about the time my dad bought really cheap ground beef from the Winn-Dixie to make a meatloaf
that ended up shrinking so much that it was left floating in a sea of fat in
the pan. The obvious moral is “don’t buy
cheap ground beef”, but I think the real moral lies in the idea that, when
everything seems to have gone to heck, there is always a plan B. In my dad’s case, plan B was to order
pizza.
Aside from telling me
stories, both of my parents used to read to me.
My favorite books were always the ones featuring kids and teens in danger
using their ingenuity to save the day. I
especially loved the ones with knights and medieval codes of honor. I liked the fact that the good guys got out
ok because they could think their way out.
Even when swords were involved, they had to use their brain to come up
with the right strategy. These were the
stories I acted out in my backyard substituting myself for the main character,
of course, and retelling them so that my knowledge set would be the one that
saved the day. When my friend or the
cute guy was in peril, I had just happened to hear of the lock picking
technique that would set him or her free.
When a dragon was threatening my party, I was the one that had taken
dragon tongue in school so I was the one that tamed the beast and made him our
ally. And when I fell off one of the
rocks in my back yard and scraped my elbow, I was the one that knew which
bottles in the medicine cabinet were disinfectants and which boxes were
Band-Aids. In every instance, the minute
anything vaguely bad happened, I was on my own.
I had a nanny in the house if something really bad happened, but for the
minor cuts and scrapes my answer to her was “I’ve got it!” I took what my dad taught me and what I
taught myself and used that knowledge to take care of things by myself.
I take this
transcendentalist sense of Self-Reliance with me everywhere. I have always been an independent child because
of it. The “Mama Lauren” business
started because I started using my limited knowledge for other people. When I went away to sleep away camp, it
somehow became decided that I was the person in my bunk that would cook for the
group because I figured out how to toast bagels in a saucepan while we were
waiting for it to heat up to make bacon.
As it turned out, I made good bacon too.
If anyone in the bunk suffered a minor injury, they knew that I would
not only have Band-Aids and antibiotic ointment but also be willing to fix them
up. If they found funky stains in their
clothes, they knew I could get them out; or at the very least get them to fade
enough that they would come out in the laundry.
These minor functions earned me the title of “Mama Lauren”. Knowing how to deal with what I considered
minor, everyday occurrences made me seem remarkable and, more importantly,
motherly.
I learned at a young
age that I ought to be able to deal with things myself. I danced through fantasy lands and through my
own life with the knowledge to get myself out of little scrapes and fix those
same little scrapes after the fact. I
learned from stories, both bound and spoken, and I put that knowledge to good
use. My backyard taught me how to tell a
story. This skill I put to good use during the summer of 2010 when a number of
my friends, myself included, were very sick.
They asked me to tell them a story, so I did. Fixing myself up taught me to fix up
others. This skill I put to good use
during a number of summers at Camp Wingate*Kirkland, where my friends first
started calling me “Mama Lauren”.
All of these skills
seem to have culminated in the story I recounted above. This past summer, “Mama Lauren” saw new life
at a summer academic program at Cambridge.
My friends came to know me as “Mama Lauren” as I brought them soup when
they were sick, as I helped them with their relationship problems, and as I
hosted massive get-togethers in my room with plenty of everyone’s favorite
foods to eat. In my room some complained
about their girlfriends back home, some confessed that they had never kissed a
boy, and some joked about their adventures.
But the story above is still
one of the ones retold in our on-line reminiscences. The “Mama Lauren Birds/Bees Talk” is where I come from. It was conceived of picture books of smiling
sperm, it maturated in tandem to my story telling skills, and, finally, it was
born in a crowded dorm room full of food and the smiling faces of friends who
looked to me for comedy and comfort.
I have never had the
“Birds/Bees Talk” with my mother. But I
have had it with myself. I taught myself
everything I needed to know. In the
words of a dear friend as he sent me off on the bus leaving Cambridge: “I
thought I was getting picked up by my mom later, but now I realize she was
already here.”
Crying ensued.
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