The losses came quickly for me. My Dad, the rock of our family, had gone into the hospital with swelling in his legs and pain in his hip. At most, we thought that they would say that his heart disease had worsened and that he needed his other hip to be replaced. What we didn’t expect, was the diagnosis: metastatic cancer with only a couple of weeks to live. Continue reading
Childhood
3 posts
From the ages of three to eight (1978-1983), I lived in that gray house in Taipei, Taiwan. It wasn’t until 2006 that I would see this house again. Join me for a tour of the house and my memories.
My maternal grandparents raised me in this house. My grandfather was a legislator, a scholar, and all around raconteur. Born to a well-to-do family, he graduated from Peking University, and was elected to China’s National Assembly in the 1940s. He, my grandmother, and their adopted one year old daughter (my mom) fled to Taiwan along with the rest of Chiang Kai-Shek’s government in 1949. Because the government no longer had control of Mainland China (where the electorate resided), National Assembly members got to hold onto their seats until the Communist rebellion was quashed. Because that quashing never happened, my grandfather became a legislator-for-life. Continue reading
We all asked it when we were children, or we really, really wanted to: How are babies made?
How does it work? He sticks what where?!?!
As a child I was fascinated by it all, and to my mother’s dismay, asked endless questions about peepee’s and weewee’s and whozits and whatzits galore (I also liked The Little Mermaid.)
My mother was conservative, but also a nurse and therefore believed it was better to answer the questions in a straightforward manner, lest I seek other more embarrassing sources for the questions that kept popping into my little head. Rather than describing things for my more visual-oriented mind, mom sat me down with a book instead. “Where Did I Come From” By Peter Mayle along with it’s companion, “What’s Happening To Me” became frequent sources of information for me growing up- I would read the descriptions of sex, ( One page reading, “By this time, the man wants to get as close to the woman as he can, because he’s feeling very loving to her. And to get really close the best thing he can do is lie on top of her and put his penis inside her, into her vagina.” left little to the imagination.) and look at the diagrams showing the stages of puberty in awe, feeling very enlightened for a 7 year old. Being let in on the big secret of the adult world opened the floodgates of my inquisitive mind. Did the man always lay on top? Did it always feel like “scratching an itch, but a lot nicer”? What happened after? How often did it happen? Did my parents do that? I never had “THE TALK” because the topic of sex and puberty was always open for discussion (In privacy, of course) with my mother.
This behavior on her part came from growing up in the 60’s with a cold-as-stone mother. Think Betty Draper, but instead of being the pampered wife of a New York Ad Executive, being the poor wife of an alcoholic farmer in the middle of nowhere. When my mom asked my Baba (Grandmother in Ukrainian) how she would know if she had gotten her period, Baba replied curtly, “You just will.” And the discussion was never to be brought up again. My mother never wanted her children to grow up distressed with unanswered questions and feeling shameful for having them in the first place, like she was made to feel.
Now I ask, how did you learn about the birds and the bees? And if you have children of your own, how have you dealt with their questions?