Mama protected the innocence of childhood. I saw my innocence as clueless, a point of view shared by my peers. Looking back through the lens of now diagnosed conditions in our family of five savants, seven overachievers and one underachiever (me), we all noticed and commented that I had more social emotional skills than the five savants.

“We celebrate strengths,” Mama insisted. I fielded questions at home to help the others understand outsiders. In that house, I was the most normal. In the outside world, I had a bit of the same autistic genes as the rest of them. I have a son like me. He has savant skills and other symptoms that put him on the spectrum. Savant skills balance brain anomalies, with the strength in one area offset by deficits in another.

1963

My youngest sister Sheila was born right after my eighth birthday. Mama went to the hospital, leaving the five of us with Daddy. As always, I asked endless questions.

"How does the baby get out of Mama's stomach?"

"She stretches open where she goes to the bathroom," said Daddy.

I thought about that, embarrassed to ask which hole the baby came out of--the pee hole or the poop hole.

"How did the baby get in there?".

Daddy hesitated before he answered, trying to be true to his unstated dilemma of both telling us the truth while not telling us a single thing about sexuality. He had religion to fall back on. "By God's gift of LOVE, " he told 8-year-old me, and any sibling involved in the discussion.

I knew what my two holes looked like. My friend Laura and I showed each other ours on a dare. When I reached the age of reason, age seven in the Catholic faith, the nuns explained what sin was. Sister explained adultery as taking off your clothes in front of "not your husband". That made what Laura and I did a mortal sin in the Catholic church, which meant straight to hell unless I confessed. I confessed after worrying for months and months, after I found out during Lent, the four weeks leading up to Easter, mortal sins gained severity, a double-whammy mortal sin, which had to be removed before communion at Easter. Under that dark cloud, I confessed. The priest asked me questions about my sin--adultery. He sounded confused.

"Me and my friend showed each other our butts" I explained, sorry, contrite, but mostly afraid of going straight to hell.

"And you thought that was adultery?" he asked.

"Yes", I mumbled.

He dealt out my penance. "Ten Our Fathers and Ten Hail Marys". Usually, I got one of each for my rote recitation of lying and dishonoring my parents, mixed up for variety.

I returned to my pew, pretending to pray while daydreaming, relieved that my mortal sin was gone. I daydreamed until the nuns gathered us up for the walk to the next-door school.

I had neighborhood friends apart from school, a half-dozen girls I called my best friends. We played girl games of the sixties and seventies, one of our favorites being Truth or Dare. We changed the rules to TRUTH only, to a default question, "What really embarrassing thing have you told no one?" I told the story of committing adultery and going to confession. As the story got retold at parties throughout our teens, my reputation as clueless became cemented.

1967

When I started my period at age 11, I had no idea what to do. Lucky for me, my big sister Teri, worldly age 12 and savant, provided me with guidance and information as she gained it. Nobody mentioned sex in our home except Teri. She knew everything, we both agreed. I remember one class with a film strip on puberty, with girls and boys separated. My expectation from that told me I'd get a pin-prick amount of blood with the need for a band-aid-sized covering. Much to my surprise and horror, this blood looked like an emergency. I needed help. I heard my sister Teri rummaging around in her room next door.

"Hey, Teri. Can I talk to you now?"

Teri stopped what she was doing from her area on the far side of her room. She sat on the edge of her bed. I stayed over by the door, nervous about what I might find out.

I described the bleeding to my big sister, expecting to be told I had cancer, which I knew all about because Mama prayed to her sister, Aunt Patricia, who died young from cancer. Teri relaxed at once launching into instructive mode, laughing with affection. We commiserated and agreed I should always come to her for these rites of passage. She told me what to ask Mama.

"I started my period I need a Kotex". My parents, who ran the PTA at our catholic school, objected to children learning more than the biological functions of puberty. They won that battle, being east coast intellectuals in a working-class midwestern small-town church. My parents taught at the local Catholic colleges, Daddy full time, Mama for extra money and self-esteem. Because of this status, my parents influenced what happened at our school.

"That is the job of parents", they insisted to the nuns, resulting in the modern nuns aborting teaching us science facts that may have filled in the blanks in my head. My parents taught us nothing.

"Children need to be protected, childhood is a short sacred time" Mama exclaimed.

Mortified, I later spewed out the script Teri helped me practice. Mama showed me where the Kotex were in the bathroom cabinet, giving me some elastic thing to go along with them. That was the only conversation about menstruation or reproduction with any adult during my growing up years.

I couldn’t have imagined how much blood would flow out of me, nor for how long. I had crippling cramps and massive bleeding. I had no idea what to do with bloody underwear. I didn’t know what to do with bloody Kotex. I wrapped them up in huge amounts of toilet paper, then carried them around in my pocket until I found a full trash can at school to hide them in. I tried to flush them down the toilet, scared to death since sometimes the toilet overflowed. Sometimes I wore one Kotex over and over while wrapping it with fresh toilet paper. The entire puberty change horrified me. I spent several years in a fog trying to navigate it. I believe I failed, based on the negative feedback on my hygiene I got from peers, like the note that suggested "smelling" stuck on my locker once I got to high school.

1971

My best friends in my neighborhood understood me. We girls discussed our periods, noticing that we synced up on the timing. We gave each other advice on menstruation and its complications. My early years, blood overflowed the giant Kotex, not yet designed to be functional. Then tampons came out. My friends extolled the virtues of not using giant wads of cotton in our crotches. I listened with my usual pretense, not wanting to give away my naivete and constant confusion. By then they declared me smart with no common sense. I knew it was not common sense I lacked, but knowledge and experience, resulting from the rich internal life that had me often withdrawing and missing important factors. The talk of tampons intrigued me enough to ask and reveal my ignorance. I remember the later problem which I parlayed into another embarrassing TRUTH to be told ad nauseam at drunken teenage parties for years to come.

One of my friends told me how to put a tampon into myself.

"Find the hole and push it in.", said the girl who was already pregnant.

I didn’t know of a third hole, but the thing did go up somewhere. I imagined it to be part of the butt crack I’d observed, where the Kotex sat. When I pulled the tampon out, I noticed a problem. The cardboard didn’t come out. Apparently, when inserting, I was supposed to intricately push the absorbent cotton part in, while discarding the applicator made of cardboard. I went to Teri once again.

"Um . . . I have a problem . . . I used a tampon. When I took it out, some of it stayed inside. Is that supposed to happen? The white cardboard part didn’t come back out."

"Did it melt? Does that part melt?"

"No Josie, it doesn’t melt." Teri showed me how to hold onto the cardboard, telling me I had to get that part out of myself.

That was enough sharing for me. I laughed, feigning disdain for the whole puberty thing. Terrified, certain that if I failed, I’d need an adult to help me with something I could not speak about, I took a bath, trying to solve this on my own. While feeling around for where the massive amounts of blood came out, I found a giant cavern. EUREKA! That answered many questions, at once. That was how a baby got out.

I remembered and understood the things Teri had shared from a teenage babysitter and library books. I dug around for the parts of the cardboard that had disintegrated inside my vagina. It was nice to have answers to fill in some of the many blanks I went through life with, afraid to ask because I never knew if it was something I got wrong or something I hadn’t yet learned. I told the entire saga in a TRUTH game, to unload whatever shame I had. I laughed along with everyone else when the story got repeated ad nauseam.

1989

Looking back through the eyes of a mother, I understand my family. Genetics determined my choice of mates. Mama came to help me with my son right after his birth, bringing along my brother. As I studied for a vocabulary test to get into graduate school, I threw out ridiculously hard words I’d never heard. My husband, brother, and mother knew every word listed in the practice booklet.

“HOW?” I asked incredulously.

“We read the dictionary.” They all declared matter-of-factly.

That’s one type of savant, recalling everything read, which both my parents and two siblings have. Mama could play piano by ear, blindfolded; my dad and three siblings knew all math without learning it; my schizophrenic dad and brother could get 100% on any test without taking classes; my husband knew the latitude and longitude of every spot on earth; my son can tell you when he got a haircut twenty years ago by a football game he watched; and his dad could recite the release dates of every album for a thirty-year span.

I was the most normal at home, while the weirdest at school, and considered myself the luckiest girl in the world.