reproduction

I was standing in the lunch line in fourth grade. my best friend, at the time, told me the story of "sex"! From that day on i understood that a boy puts his "thing"(her terms) inside of you, the the boy pees inside the girl! then, BOOM!, your pregnant with a baby! When we had sex ed in the 5th grade, I was blown away by the fact of sperm! Needless to say, I was still stupid enough to raise my hand and ask about the whole "peeing" thing!!!!

S. Watters

During the summer when school was out I would have to watch the Soaps with my nannie. Since we lived in the south and this was in the 1960's no one in our family openly discussed how a women became pregnant. But I remember the seeing the ladies on the television sitting on the sofas with their husbands/boyfriends. They would sit close, holding each other and kissing. As the scene would fade out the couple fell backward. Then came the commercials. Well next weeks episode the lady always told the man she was pregnant. So...I figured that as long as I did not sit on a sofa and kiss falling backward I would get pregnant. I kept that belief until I turned 15 years old!

Janice Dickens-Jackson

When I was 5, my mother was due to have my little brother in a month or so and i overheard a conversation she was having with my aunt about what hospital she was going to go to. Later, I was with my dad and asked him where i was born, and for some unapparent reason, he decided to tell me i was born at the Bonaza restaurant in town. I believed that for a year or so.

Anon

My parents used to explain the act of reproduction as when the man combines his "seed" with the woman's "egg". My limited understanding of these terms lead me to the conclusion that a man could take just any old seed like a popcorn seed, mash it together with a chicken egg that a woman was holding, and presto, the woman becomes pregnant!

...Yes, I shame to admit that this was after I understood the concept of pregnancy.

I used to rationalize single mothers in my head by reasoning that the woman could just take her own popcorn seeds.

Jeremy

By the time I was about six or so, I had gathered the gist of how sex works: the man sticks his penis in the woman, ejaculates (although I didn't know that word) something into her, and then she gets pregnant. However, I didn't exactly understand *where* the man stuck his penis. So, using standard kid logic, I figured that since women don't have a penis, the only remaining bit down there is the anus.

I decided at that point that I never wanted to have kids, because the last thing I wanted to do was shove my genitals into some woman's behind.

Joshua Norton

I used to think that babies came from urine.

oh no

When I was very young, a boy at school told me that sex involved a man putting something into a woman's belly button (a worm, he explained to me) and that worm would eventually gestate into a full grown baby. He told me that boys practiced by putting their worm into holes cut into bars of soap. This made perfect sense to me, as babies in pregnant women appeared to be centered around the belly button. The first time I saw the umbilical cord on TV, my belief was confirmed, as I figured that was the vestige of said man's worm, clinging for dear life.

morphoeugenia

I believed that my parents didn't have to have sex in order for me to be made. When my cousin told me that everyone had sex to have kids I called him a liar.

Anon

I was absolutely convinced that babies were actually in the stomach and the woman was pregnant as a result of something she ate. How did the baby come out? That was obious, it comes out the same way food comes out. I mean from watching all those scenes on tv where a woman was having a child it looked like she was taking a very large and painful dump.

Margie

I took sex ed in 6th grade in a fairly conservative town. We covered how the sperm fertilized the egg, but not exactly how it got there. I thought that men ejaculated tiny sperm into the air--they'd float around until they found a nice woman to swim into, and then there'd be a baby.

Anon

When I was a little girl, my big sister got pregnant. In his own way, my father explained it to me...he told me that she had eaten a watermelon seed, and that it was growing in her belly, and that the same went for any fruit seed. I used to believe that she was growing a watermelon in her belly.

Jessica

When I was 16 and my stepmother was 34, we were talking about a man who was proud of having eight sons. She said, "That's nothing to be proud of -- it just depends on which testicle the sperm came out of." She thought the girl sperm came from one and the boy sperm from the other. I was stunned.

Bee

When I was about 9 or so, there was a neighbor girl who "had" to get married. I didn't really understand what the meant at the time. I was told by a friend that she was going to have a baby. I told her that that was impossible. You had to be married first to have a baby. In my young mind, marriage definitely came first. It was *impossible* to become pregnant without marriage.

Brenda

At the age of six, after seeing an afternon soap opeara and the crying actresses, I became stressed out and convinced that pregnacy was a disease that you could catch like a cold and that there was nothing you could do to avoid it.

Lea Anne