Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Babies and other mysteries

Hmm .. I'm not sure about being creative (see comment on previous post), but I think to some extent I was forced to be, since I grew up in a family that didn't believe that children needed to be told ANYTHING, and i was a child of "'satiable curiosity", like the elephant's child in Kipling's Just So stories. So I had to make up my own answers. One of the clearest examples I remember come from when I was a bit over 4 and my next sister (R) was born. I had no idea where babies came from,had no idea even that there was one on the way, all I knew is that I was woken up in the middle of the night and dropped off at my grandmother's (with no explanation) and the next morning my grandmother had a phonecall and told me that I had a new baby sister. The only other things I knew were that they got the baby in hospital, and my mother had taken a suitcase with her. So what did I cocnclude? that when you wanted a baby (and I suspected it cost a lot of money) you went to hospital with a set of white knitted baby clothes, laid them out properly in a bassinet, and then the hospital got a brown medicine bottle of stuff and poured it into the clothes, and, because doctors were such clever people, it turned into a baby!!! Yeah, I wish ....

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