This is one of the few happy less than horrible memories I have of Baker City, Oregon. Over all, my view of the (very) small town has been irreversibly colored in ugly shades of chartreuse and brown, and for good reason. We owned a shop there, and it was regularly broken into by a rival's teenaged thugs. In school, I was discriminated against by the upper classmen - meaning the second graders - for being the only pudgy girl they knew. I have no doubt that if I had been forced to spend my entire childhood there, I'd be irreversibly damaged and socially broken. But we're not here to angst over my childhood or praise fate for moving me to the more accepting region of Oregon known as the Wilamette Valley. No, we're here to laugh at an incident that occurred when I was in kindergarten.
As a five-six year old, I was less than sociable and I wasn't interested in being friends with some people. One of these people was the only other girl in my class, Brittany, and she desperately wanted to be my friend. Looking back, I feel bad about the way I treated her, because I viewed her as little more than an annoyance. I was much more interested in playing with the boys, particularly Daniel, who I had an adorable little crush on, than I was in playing with Brittany. It helped that I wasn't exactly the kind of little girl who liked to play with Barbie dolls.
It was Barbie and her horrifically child-inappropriate amounts of sex appeal that got my childhood self in trouble with my teacher for, as near as I can remember, the first time. It was lunch time, and back then we were allowed to bring toys to school, so I had a Barbie or two in my purple, plastic, unknown-cartoon-themed lunchbox, or something along those lines, and I decided that today was an okay day to play with Brittany. Days like this usually resulted in us playing some variety of "house," if this particular incident is anything to judge by. And, probably because I was older, I ended up playing the mom and she ended up playing the teenaged daughter who, apparently, had a boyfriend.
Now, unlike most six-year-olds, I had already seen several R-rated movies, and I had a rough idea of what sex was - it was when a lady and a man got in bed together and wrestled naked. I may also have had an idea from an incident out of my memory where I apparently walked in on my parents - this should be relieble information, given that it's coming from my mom. I like to imagine that I said something along the lines of, "leave my mommy alone," with the most "D:" like look on my face, when that happened, but that's only because it would make the incident that much funnier. I honestly don't know what happened.
Like most six-year-olds, I didn't know the meaning of "adultery" or understand why Jesus didn't want us to commit it, only that it was bad. So I had no idea that sex and adultery were somewhat on the same bandwidth when Mom, my Barbie, started telling Daughter, Brittany's Barbie, not to have sex with her boyfriend, being very adamant about the fact and kind of loud, because I've always had a loud inside voice.
Take a moment to comprehend this fully. My teacher probably never saw anything like it before or after, a six-year old adamantly ordering her friend's Barbie not to have sex. I could have been the poster child for the abstinence movement: "See, kids, even a six-year-old knows that having sex before you're married is a bad idea." Instead of calling the abstinence people and tipping them off to my obsolete point of view, my teacher did the sensible thing and told me that it was a bad word and not to use it.
I wasn't quite sure why it was a bad word. I didn't really know what it was, sex. But I obeyed, filing that word away with almost everything my father said back then - and now, really - on the list of words that I am not to use, ever. How amusing that, out of all those words, sex is probably the only one left that I hesitate to use even when it's appropriate.
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