Highschool teacher Maria Capalongan shows male and female reproductive sysytem models that she uses... [+]
Four years ago yesterday my father died from cirrhosis of the liver. Last year I wrote a post on my personal blog, and I promised I would write a story about him every year, on this day, to keep his memory alive. This entry is keeping that promise.
My father loved to teach me things prematurely.
Since my father was a teacher, he taught me everything like the academic he was. He always had a scientific seriousness about it. There were charts, pictures, and any other teaching aid he thought would help me understand what he was teaching.
My first memory of my father giving me a premature lesson was when I was six. He taught me about sex- “where babies come from,” as he put it. And when he told me about sex, he told me about how everyone had sex: how women and men had sex, how women and women had sex, and how men and men had sex. The consummate professional, he was thorough to a fault. My guess is he wanted to tell me before it was too late, before I was too embarrassed to be seen with him and too cool to listen to anything he said.
This lesson was among the first things Dad told me not to tell my Mom; but I was small so I ran and told her everything. She was not happy. She was not happy at all. I remember overhearing him tell my mom, “I wasn’t going to tell her some stork s***.”When you mix the tough, no nonsense edge of a Marine with the brilliance and patience of an academic and stir, you get Allen Bridges.
A couple years later my father would also teach me about my menstrual cycle. I remember him drawing a vagina on a paper napkin at our dining room table; he outlined the uterus, the ovaries, the endometrium, the fallopian tubes, etc. With arrows and hand gestures he showed me what would happen inside my body every month, “once you become a woman.” He would go on to teach me Hannibal’s military formations on a paper napkin at IHOP when I was in 9th grade. In hindsight, I’ve learned a respectable amount of information on paper napkins.
When my friends and I have exchanged stories about when we got, “the sex talk,” I realized how many of them didn’t get a talk- most of them got a book, then didn’t hear about it again until sex ed. For the record, I think it’s a shame more kids don’t get vagina diagrams, and I think I’m better off because I did. It takes a real man to be a Marine, and comfortably teach his daughter about her menstrual cycle.
I turned 25 today. I live with my boyfriend in a big city with a big puppy. I think about all the questions I have that I would give anything to know his answer to: how to share my life with someone, how to get my dog to obey me, how to properly invest my money, etc. You never think those conversations mean anything until you can’t have them- that’s when you realize that they’re all you really want.
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