The Things We Believe

The other day the Wily Republican and I got to talking about harems. Really, we were discussing the perks of being royalty, and he seemed to think that having a harem was an excellent fringe benefit.

I told the WR that when I was little I'd wanted to belong to a harem. Back then, I had these opulent, full-color cartoon books that retold all the best old tales, and one of the books was about Scheherazade. In that book there was page after page after page of willowy, tanned women draped in pink and purple and green veils, in tiny garlands of gold coins. I could imagine the way they sounded when they walked into a room, swishing, clinking. I wanted to be that kind of girl. I wanted to command attention when I breezed through archways. I wanted to lounge around on satin pillows and eat fruit and be amused by trained monkeys. It sounded like an okay life, but I didn't quite realize the implications of the harem. I didn't quite realize these ladies had a function other than being pretty and being audiences for monkeys.

The WR found this to be amusing. I'm sure the thought of me at seven years old, running around and draping hankies into my jeans so that I too could swish when I walked into a room, was pretty amusing. So he laughed.

"Yeah," I said. "It is funny what we'll talk ourselves into believing as children." Which reminded me of something else, something worse, something more moronic that I'd believed when I was young. But instead of being founded from something I'd read, this other belief sprung from something I'd watched.

I was eight years old when John Travolta and Kirstie Alley starred in Look Who's Talking. I was little. I was impressionable. I was stupid.

In the beginning of the movie, Kirstie Alley is locked in a passionate embrace with her boyfriend. They are about to have some sex on top of his big mahogany desk, but at eight years old, I didn't understand that was where this was going. I just saw the kissing, and that was something I did understand. When two people loved each other, they showed that love by kissing. Fine. But what happened next I did not understand. Not at all. The editing of the film shows the two kissing and then cuts directly to a shot of sperm racing toward an egg.

Oh my God, my eight year old brain thought. That's how a woman gets pregnant! By French kissing a boy!

Needless to say, that made me very nervous. People were always kissing on television, in movies, even out in the real world. I wasn't sure they knew what they were getting themselves into. After all, that sperm was pouring from the boys' mouths into the girls' mouths, and that meant that, in a matter of weeks, those girls could be sporting beach-ball size lumps under their tank tops. It seemed too dangerous to risk. So I made myself a promise right then and there. I would never, ever, ever, ever French kiss a boy unless I was certain I wanted to have babies with him.

I'm not exactly sure when I came around to thinking that this particular train of thought was inaccurate, but I do remember it took a long time. My mother tried to talk me out of it once, after I'd told her I had no interest in kissing a boy because I didn't want to make any babies. She tried to tell me that kissing didn't automatically mean baby, but I informed her that she didn't have to protect me. I told her I'd seen Look Who's Talking, and I knew what was up. My mother, I'm sure, had to walk out of the room then to go have a good laugh at my expense.

I would assume it took years of listening to snippets of conversation from the high school girls on the bus, listening to the boys in the lunchroom, and listening to things my friends had learned from older siblings for me to finally shake the belief that if I locked lips with a boy I might become a young mother, the kind that was always making tearful appearances on Oprah and Sally Jesse Raphael. And thank God for my coming out of that phase. Thank God. If I'd somehow continued on in my sheltered way, I would've missed so much goodness, and it took me long enough to get to that sweet point in my life as it was.