Like Adam and Steve before him, Jeremy Feist had been presented his own personal paradise, and he abandoned it in search of the knowledge of where babies come from.

Originally appeared on JeremyFeist.com

“Where do babies come from?”

I have yet to meet a single parent, custodian, or legal guardian who enjoys answering this question. It’s sort of like when your kid asks “Where do we go when we die?” or “Why do I look more like Mommy’s personal trainer than I do Daddy?” If you do it right, your kids becomes a normal member of society. Fuck it up, and your kid grows up to be one of those clowns with the bodies of half a dozen dead hookers stowed in their crawlspace.

It’s my personal experience that parents would gladly do anything other than talk to their kids about sex. Ask them to jump in front of a bullet for their kids? Abso-fucking-lutely. Drive them to hockey practice at 5:30 in the morning? They’ll do it every week. But the sex talk? Not a chance. All bets are off the moment you ask a parent to talk to their kids. They would rather run their genitals over a belt-sander than tell their kids about how they used those same genitals, a box of red wine, and a fear of dying alone to create a welfare check.

I mean a baby.

The first time I ever asked this question, my parents gave each other the old side-eye and muttered something along the lines of “storks bring ‘em, shut up.” It was the oh-so classic Irish gambit of suppressing anything awkward and uncomfortable in the hopes that it would just go away.

The wonderful thing about kids is that they’re stupid. Of course storks brought babies! It was a matter of Occam’s razor: Parents want babies, storks bring babies, done. That’s it. There was no way creating life involved a complicated series of combining genetics, DNA and chromosomes into a cell that gradually replicates itself into a sentient being. Fucking storks, man. Had to be fucking storks.

My knowledge of life-giving storks allowed me to rule over my preschool with an iron fist, one that was carefully wrapped in wool mittens safety-pinned to my five-inch thick jacket. I used my secret to as a bartering tool amongst my new subjects. Of course I would tell you where babies come from … for a price. Juice boxes, Play-Doh, finger paint … I sat atop my throne of perceived truth, the halls of Kirkland Tot’s Time my own personal kingdom. But every empire must fall eventually. My downfall came in the form of Joshua S.

“Storks don’t bring babies,” he said, punctuating his heresy by nonchalantly wiping a bulging, viscous green glob of snot on the sleeve of his Osh-Kosh B’Gosh.

“Yuh-huh, babies come from storks, ’cause my mommy and daddy said so, and you’re lying,” I said, my royal decree slightly undercut by both my lack of proper syntax, as well as the dried, sticky reside of juice all over my face.

“Nuh-uh, my parents told me where babies come from, and they said that it wasn’t storks.”

Clearly, something was rotten in the state of Pointe-Claire. My world was being turned upside-down. My parents wouldn’t lie to me! Babies came from storks because they had to. I decided to investigate further, just as soon as my mommy came to pick me up. Until then, I decided to play Fairy Godmother and Princess with my very first Fag Hag, Jessica C.

I was, of course, the Fairy Godmother.

Like Adam and Steve before me, I had been presented my own personal paradise, and I had been presented the offer to abandon it in the search for knowledge. And like Steve, I was about to listen to that lying, snotty c**t Joshua S. and take a big fucking bite out of the apple of where babies actually come from.

“Joshua S. said that his parents said that storks don’t bring babies,” I told my mother, as we stood in the hallway of the pre-school.

“That’s because Joshua’s mom is an alcoholic,” said my mother. “Storks bring babies. Let’s go home now, m’kay?”

“Not until you tell me where babies come from,” I said, trying to look as menacing as I could despite the fact that my numerous winter jackets made me look like an ewok.

“Storks. Storks bring them.”

At this point, I was furious. I backed her into a corner of the hallway and started wailing as loud as I could “WHERE DO BABIES COME FROM?!”

Cue the floodgates. “Whenamanandawomanloveeachotherverymuchthedaddystickshispenisinthemommyandlaysanegganditgrows
insideofherandninemonthslaterababycomesoutofhervagina!” she stage-whispered, somehow managing to compress the entire reproductive process down into one desperate, resentful hiss.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

What the shit? Penis and vaginas and … No, seriously, what? How did that make any more sense than stupid-looking birds flying over live, screaming infants? Like fuck that happened. Didn’t she know that penises were for peeing? None of it made any sense whatsoever. But then again, my mom did say that was the case, and I was still at the stage in my life where anything my parents said was pure, unadulterated gospel. So babies now came from peeing in a lady.

That night over dinner, I sat at the table with my older brother, Jonathan, as my mother tried to feed my baby brother Anthony. Dad looked over at Jonathan and asked him if he had learned anything in Kindergarten that day. “Yeah, a friend told me that babies come from storks!” he said.

My mother immediately turned her attention to me, her eyes wide with fear. This was my chance. I had one opportunity to try out my revised logic, and by fuck I was going to go for it. “Babies don’t come from storks! We were all made when Daddy stuck his penis in Mommy and peed in her vagina and then we came out!”

Pin drop. My parents looked at me like I had just told my brother that I was going to stab him in the head, and Jonathan looked at me with a look that suggested, and would later be confirmed, he had just shit his pants.

And thus marked the end of my kingdom of truthiness. My parents made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone else where babies come from. Not that they needed to, anyway. I mean for shit’s sake, babies coming out of pee-filled vaginas? HA! Like that would ever happen.