Four Writers Remember "The Talk"

 
Rosemary Mahoney's family
Easter Sunday, 1963; the writer; front row, right

"Perish the Thought"

By Rosemary Mahoney

What did my mother say to me about sex? Not a damn thing. In all my formative years I got not one word about sex from my mother, a woman who had seven kids in exactly seven years. My mother's parents were both born in Ireland in the early 1880s and fell victim to the dire warnings and searing admonishments that the Irish Catholic clerics promulgated about sex. In the Ireland of the time, sex was probably considered the most shameful evil. That sentiment naturally cast its shadow on my mother. She was hardly a prude, but as far as I can remember she never raised the subject with me until I was approaching my 30s. 

I have a photograph of my mother taken just after Catholic Mass on Easter Sunday, 1963. She is surrounded by her many children, her head draped in a long black lace mantilla worthy of the papal countess. (The papal countess at that time was Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, another Irish Catholic woman who produced children with notable volume and urgency—nine of them in 18 years.) According to the dictates of Vatican I, no woman was allowed to enter a Catholic church without a proper head covering. The veil was evidence not only that the woman was respectful of her church but that she was also modest and chaste.

This has always been the weird paradox of the Roman Catholic Church: Sex is evil, shameful, and unspeakable, but by all means do go ahead and have as many children as you possibly can. (My mother's grandmother, a devout Catholic, had 13 children in a yet again mind-bogglingly short period of time.) But the thing about producing so many children so quickly is that everybody knows exactly how you've been spending your spare time. I have a friend who says that when he sees a pregnant woman all he can think of is the sex that led to it. The pregnancy is always somehow sacred but the act that led to it somehow isn't. This, of course, is why the Blessed Virgin had to be a virgin. If she was the mother of God in any ordinary way, then some guy had to have climbed into bed with her. Perish the thought.

With three older sisters and three older brothers, one comes to know about sex one way or another. By the time I was 12, I had learned the basics in bemusing bits and pieces. My case could, I suppose, have been worse. I could have suffered the Catholic mother a friend of mine got. When my friend went to her mother at age 13 and announced in bafflement that there was blood in her underpants, the mother wound up and slapped her full force across the face.

 


 

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Photo: Courtesy of Rosemary Mahoney