The Quest for Knowledge

I can remember when I first asked the question.
“Where do babies come from Mammy? “ My Mother must have been startled because she repeated my question. Where do babies come from she muttered looking into the distance. She paused and shook the sodabread dough from her fingers.
“Well we found you in the cabbages”. But I wasn’t giving up.
“And my brother?”
“He was in the gooseberry bushes”

My quest for knowledge temporarily satisified, I kept the cabbages and the gooseberries under close observation for some time. But nothing happened.

The next time I asked was a little more hopeful and indicated that my Mother might not actually have been truthful the first time.

“I’ll tell you when you grow up”.


Where babies came from was a closely guarded adult secret. And they were not telling, at least not until you “grew up”. But when might that be?

It was my friend Patsy who moved me a little closer to solving the mystery. Her Mammy had six children. She must know. I would have to wait a while though. I’d just given her a birthday card and misspelled her name. To Pasty I had written. Things were a little difficult for a week or so and she wouldn’t walk home from school with me. But then she came to ask for some peas from the garden and Mammy despatched us both with bowls.

I brought up the subject carefully. Patsy’s response was totally nonchalant as she was eating a handful of peas at the time. “Oh, they cut open the Mother’s stomach”. I had been helping myself to the odd pod of peas, despite instructions not to “spoil my appetite”. Suddenly neither the sweet crunchy peas, or the promise of jelly and ice-cream for afters seemed to appeal. My appetite was gone, swept away on the winds of knowledge.

Patsy went on, “well my Mammy’s had two like that, and I was one of them.
She sounded almost proud of this, though I couldn’t imagine why. My quest for knowledge took a nose-dive after that.

No wonder the grown-ups weren’t telling. Suddenly I had an enormous desire to become a nun, that would release me from the dangers of motherhood.

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