When I was a little girl, I didn’t know if I was a niece or a nephew. I was four, when I had many operations of the mastoid bone and I knew that they cut something out of me, but I never quite knew what it was that they were cutting out so much. They really did not explain things to children in those days. Growing up in a family that preferred boys, I never had any information about sex in my home. It was not proper, though my father was a physician. I remember on a Sunday ride visitingboth grandmothers, my father’s mother first, asking how were babies born and there was a dead silence in the car, like I had said something horrible and I knew never to ask that question again. I used to sit behind my Father’s reading chair next to the closet under the steps where he had his home delivery obstetrical satchel and where he had a glass front bookcase, the type you lift up the lid and stick it back, reading what I could understand in his obstetrical.. surgical and anatomy books. They had pictures in them, beautiful steel engravings. They were the only art work I saw...at school were photographs of George Washington. At home of my Father. I had to hid there. One time my Mother found me and she swooped down like a big vulture saying they were unnatural for me to look at and took them away. In fact, I have a terrible scar on my behind because one time when I was hiding behind the big chair in the dark,,, looking at books I thought beautiful and yet forbidden, my two brothers were having a terrible fight with each other and they pushed the reading chair back which then pushed me into the glass bookcase. They discovered me. I was taken to the hospital emergency room to get the glass out of me and get sutured. But what my Mother was most angry about, was not that I had been severely cut, but that I was reading these terrible books.

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