How were you told about the facts of life? What illusions were you under as a child before you learned the truth? This isn’t something I’d normally think about very often; I’m in Orgo this semester; I don’t really have time for anything. But over winter break, I watched the HBO series Watchmen (by the way, it’s incredible). I won’t spoil it for those who don’t live on campus and can’t access the free HBO, but there’s one scene where a character goes fishing in a river and pulls up little babies that he can then “science” into full grown people. After I tried to process how weird that show is, I realized that my path to learning the facts of life was, like the process of fishing for babies, rather convoluted. In fact, I’m happy to share with you that, until recently, I was under the illusion that Moses and I shared the same origin story.
If you’ll recall, the biblical figure Moses was abandoned by his mother as a baby when he grew too big for her to hide. She placed him in a basket and left it the bulrushes of a river, hoping he would be found by kind, albeit unsuspecting, passersby. The Pharaoh’s daughter comes down to the river, finds the baby, and decides to name him Moses, meaning “to draw out/pull out [of the water].”
My parents were fond of telling me that circa February 2000, they were minding their own business near a river when a basket floated by. My mom took a fancy to the basket and asked my dad to go get it. Much to their surprise and disappointment, there was a baby in the basket as well. They always emphasized that they just wanted the basket but felt bad and figured that they’d better take the baby too.
I don’t know if this was an attempt to avoid telling me about “the facts of life” or just a way to deflate my own sense of self-importance. At this point, I’d also like to mention that they never told my brother this story. Apparently, once you’ve picked up one kid from a river, it’s best not to push your luck with another one. And I did learn where babies actually came from (it’s the stork, right?) but I didn’t make the connection between this story and Moses’s until I saw Watchmen’s own baby origin story. Weird, right?
In conclusion, for a very long period in my life, I believed that my parents had scooped me and my basket combo from the river in the same way that you find a cute shirt at the mall but with a weird necklace attached and you decide to buy it even though it has the necklace. Gemma even means “precious stone” in Italian, so I really am a literal piece of jewellery. Oh well.