"Mommy, what's a blowjob?"

If there's one thing I never really talked to my folks about, it was sex. I mean, at the tender age of 12 I walked in on my father rolling back and forth on top of my mother, both of them painfully naked, at about 8 on a Friday night. He was quite overweight then and it made me wonder if that's how whales mated.

As a result, sex held little allure for me. It looked... weird. Awkward. Just plain bad, honestly. I simply didn't ask, and they didn't tell.

It's one of those things I wish now I'd talked to my mom about more before she died. The older I get, the more I wonder whether she really did have a vixen under her skin. I remember when a friend of hers turned 50, and she found & ordered this studly stripper guy and had him come to our condo to do a striptease. She asked me to do the photography (and naturally I fucked that up) and it was a "wine and cheese" and wiener night, apparently. The women, so mature and nice and friendly were all gushing over this dark, buff, cute guy stripping for school tuition. He put some jeans on later and sat talking with them for two hours after the gig.

"Oh, I'm working my way through college, studying criminology."

My, what big brains you have, Brad.

_______________

One of the all-time fave sex conversations I had with my mother transpired when I was about eight years old.

We were watching a video of Steve Martin’s “The Jerk” one day, and there was a joke about a blowjob. Mom howled with laughter, wiping tears from her eyes. She was a sucker for Steve. I didn’t get the joke. I furrowed my little blond brows and turned to scrutinize her.

“Mom, what’s a blowjob?”

“Hmm?”

“A blowjob, what is it?”

“Oh, that’s when a woman sucks on a man’s penis, dear.”

“Ew! Why would she want to do that?”

She shrugged and said, “Ah, you got me, sweetie. You got me.”

This casual dismissal of blowjobs made me think they were insane. "She sucks on his pee-pee?" was the thought running through my head. "How icky. EW."

She rewound the segment, played the joke again, and this time I giggled, too, with a hint of revulsion.

I was more of a Fudgsicle girl way back when.