This post is part of the Grassroots Blogger Book Marketing Campaign 2008, and is meant to generate donations for The Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN).

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The defining characteristic of my sexual history is there isn’t much of it.

I know that probably seems strange for someone nearly thirty years old, but I assure you that my marathon of inexperience wasn’t intentional. As I mentioned previously, I never received “The Talk,” so I knew precious little about sex in my youth.

My sexual education began to come in bits and pieces when I started public school at the age of nine. I might have had some sort of foundation to build upon if I were one of those little girls that played Doctor or House. Of course, I couldn’t be bothered with games like that. I was an active child who liked to run around outdoors, usually pretending I was one of the Thundercats or perhaps Wonder Woman. I also favored Cops and Robbers, which wasn’t as popular with my parents because they kept finding children tied to my swingset.

Bondage exercises aside, I was pretty clueless.

It was in those later elementary school years that I recall learning what the term virgin meant. I was familiar with the word. I had spent five years at Saint Peter & Saint Paul, after all. I knew Mary was a virgin and that it was relevant somehow to baby Jesus. But beyond that I couldn’t give much of a definition. Our teachers always got fuzzy on the specifics.

I also remember distinctively when in the sixth grade a classmate asked me, “Stacey, have you ever kissed a boy?” I was eleven. The boys I knew liked to make farting sounds with their armpits, flick boogers in the girls’ hair, and handle worms. And as far I as was concerned, kissing was for grown-ups and people in love. Why anyone would want to try that with the kid behind me that kept kicking my chair during math was unfathomable. My surprise at the question was apparent, so before I could fumble for an appropriate answer another classmate chirped, “Of course she hasn’t. Stacey is a prude.”

Prude was another new word for me. I wasn’t sure what it meant, only that it was said with disdain. How was I to know that my peers were already practicing sucking each other’s faces off?

If my ignorance wasn’t readily apparent in elementary school, it certainly became well-known in middle school. My first day of the new school year I immediately noticed that my classmates seemed, well, different. That summer puberty had come to the entire seventh grade . . . except me. This meant two things:

1. I would be forced to endure three years of hearing “Stacey’s so flat she makes the walls jealous!”

2. My peers were now driven by hormones. Hormones that hadn’t made any effort to begin stirring within me.

I was suddenly a child among women. My peers paraded around the schoolyard showing off their new curves and talking about Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven (neither of which have I ever played). Meanwhile I hadn’t yet discovered makeup. I was years away from a training bra. Hell, my mother never even advised me on when to start shaving my legs. I felt woefully out of place, though I couldn’t understand exactly why . . .

“And when he walked away I could still feel the warmth of his handprint on my ass!” my friend Sarah eagerly shared with a group of us. As it often does, my face betrayed my shock. “Don’t mind Stacey,” she continued, rolling her eyes. “She still thinks boys are yucky.” Laughter.

I didn’t, in fact, think boys were yucky. I adored boys ever since Brian Segal held my hand as we recited Jack and Jill together for Kindergarten graduation. Something about boys’ impish grins had a way of sending my heart aflutter. Perhaps to prove this fondness, when a boy who lived nearby had his friend call me to see if I’d “go out” with him, I said yes. I had no more interest in my new beau than I did in any other boy, really, but even at the age of thirteen I was aware that “going out” meant nothing more than a declaration of mutual like, at most. After three months of awkward phone calls and passing notes on the schoolbus, the boy’s friend called again. My first boyfriend and I amicably parted ways.

The school year was winding down by then, and soon it was time for the eighth grade dance. I remember slow dancing with a number of boys, but one in particular sticks out in my mind. His name was Jared, I believe. I didn’t know Jared well, so I was surprised and a bit intimidated when he caught me in the hallway and told me to remember to save a dance for him. That’s not why I remember Jared though. I remember Jared because as we swayed in little circles to the music, he leaned down and whispered in my ear, “I bet one day you’ll be the prettiest girl in high school.”

Me? The girl that didn’t seem to have a prayer of growing breasts? The girl that was trying to get used to wearing nylons and wouldn’t dream of attempting to walk in heels? The girl who now had braces and still had never kissed a boy? Was he serious?

I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. High school loomed just on the horizon . . .

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The first house I remember living in wasn’t exactly a prime piece of real estate. When the three-year-old can point out the friendly neighborhood crackhouse, you know you’re in a bad area.

Because our neighbors were a colorful assortment of characters you’d half-expect to see featured on an episode of Cops, we tried to keep to ourselves . . . and keep them away. There’s something about finding a teenage boy sneaking around your property–a book of matches in one hand, a fistful of dry leaves in the other–that makes you get territorial.

My mother was a homemaker and security guard, responsible for raising the kids and protecting the castle. She was excellent at both. Not only did Mom have the patience and endurance to rock my colicky sister every night until she finally descended into a fitful sleep, but she also managed to gently persuade our wifebeater-clad neighbor Leroy to stop tearing up the hill on his motorcycle at two in the morning (she told him she’d string a cable between the telephone poles and decapitate his Harley-loving ass).

By the time my brother came along, Mom was an old pro at sheltering us from the unpleasantness of our surroundings.

My mother and my baby brother spent many of their days sitting on our front porch assessing the steady decline of the neighborhood and chasing off the delinquents, truants, coke heads and pyromaniacs. Though a preschooler, my brother wanted to stand sentinel just like my mother. He made it his duty to handle trespassers relative to his own size, which included the paperboy’s cat. It was a rough neighborhood and that feline could have had a serious narcotics addiction for all we knew. At the very least, it liked to sleep on the hood of my dad’s car and scratch the paint.

Of course, we’re talking about a cat here. We all know that cats have no sense of boundaries and no respect for rules. This one was no different. Though it surely knew it was an unwelcome visitor, it wasn’t deterred from strolling around our yard or pissing in our sandbox.

One afternoon my brother was occupying his usual station on the porch when he spied the cat creeping through the front bushes. Springing into action, he leaped down the steps, barreled towards the cat and yelled, “Shoo!”

Startled, the animal retreated, darting back across the road. Well . . . halfway. A car came speeding up the hill just as the cat attempted its escape. Just like that, the lithe, graceful feline became a smear on the pavement.

Concerned about the effect this lesson in mortality would have on my young brother, my mother jumped up to collect him and usher him into the house. He was still frozen to his spot, staring at the bloody mess with the sick fascination that children have for suffering creatures. The cat lifted its crushed skull and twisted its neck until it could see my brother. With its last breaths it glared at him in an accusatory manner and made pathetic dying kitty noises.

Before my mother could whisk him away so the trauma of the experience would not become forever etched upon his delicate memory, my brother regarded the splattered kitty remains and scolded, “You shoulda looked both ways.”

The holidays always remind me of my days as a Catholic schoolgirl. When everyone in the class goes to the church down the road, no one worries about being PC and learning about Passover. We celebrated all the Christian holidays without a moment’s worry over offending a Jehovah’s witness. As far as the school was concerned, we all walked (and partied) with Jesus. Heathens would just have to miss out on photo ops with the Easter Bunny.

Each holiday, our teachers scrambled to prepare a “feast” for their classes. They would cook a special festive meal to share with the students. In theory, it sounds great. But when you’re a kid (and most likely a picky eater), straying from a Stove-Top stuffed Butterball is a big no no.

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At one time during my childhood, my mother, siblings, and I used to regularly attend Sunday service. With that weekly dose of holiness, my mother was certain that her children were oozing purity from every pore.

My brother was whipping my sister in the head with a pussy willow on the drive home from church one morning when he gave pause to ask, “Hey Mom, why don’t they give out palms on Palm Sunday?”

“They do,” my mother replied. “They were out of palms by the time we got to the altar. All they had left were the pussy willows.”

My brother thought about that for a moment. Then, with all the innocence of a child who has not yet received a proper public school education (or at least never read the backseat of the bus), he asked, “Well, if they always have enough pussy willows, why don’t they just call it Pussy Sunday?”

My brother, the atheist, bringing people back to the church.

Mom was never really fond of yard work. To be honest, there were parts of the backyard where she’d prefer never to venture. But after Dad’s second back surgery, all of the physically strenuous chores became her responsibility. She would have been glad for help, but her children were still far too young for hard physical labor (we were only old enough to work in sweat shops at the time). And so she inherited the arduous task of mowing the lawn.

The job wouldn’t have been nearly as loathsome if we had a nice, flat yard. Unfortunately, very little of our property was flat. We lived, more or less, in the middle of the slope of a hill. Other than the area leveled off enough to build a house on, the yard was a huge bank of earth. Our backyard was informally divided into two parts. There was the bottom lot — a narrow strip of coveted level land where we were allowed to play as children — and there was the top lot — the peak of our slope (slightly leveled off) where our swimming pool and fruit trees were located. For some reason the grass grew unusually fast on the top lot, which prompted a deadly fear in my mother. Because, as anybody who lives in a rural, wooded area knows, where there is tall grass, there are snakes.

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