Growing Up "Mexican" Made Me Appreciate Being A Woman

We are all Hispanic and the old people speak Spanish and the young people know a few words. Mostly we know words that we learned before we started school. My mother referred to our privates as 'la cuevita del amor', the little cave of love, or for boys 'el guzanito del placer', the little worm of pleasure. But we were very young and we used those expressions without knowing what they meant.

Sex was talked about every day. One aunt would ask my mother if my father 'gave it to her' or if she had to talk to Pedro who worked in the yard, they laughed and answered back with 'the old man can't get hard and Pedrito is too young'. One afternoon after school my sisters and I were in the kitchen with my mother and my grandmother when grandmother asked me 'ya te dieron duro?', 'have you gotten it hard?'. Then talking to my younger sisters about how boys were looking at them grow up and now that they were showing 'tetas' the boys were getting hot'. Just look at your sister, she's like a 'perra en la calle', 'a female dog in the street', and the 'machos' with their hard dicks, 'vergas paradas', were following her to see which one of them would mount her.

One day when I was 19 a man, not a boy, pressed me down until he got his worm of pleasure in my love cave and I became a woman. 'Now that you're his woman, it's your place to serve him', 'he's your husband now'. No room for discussion, like the dogs in the street, he had gotten to me and now I belonged to him. We got married in a large celebration, no one cared that he had gotten to me and now I had to get married. All I heard was how lucky I was 'ese si es hombre', 'that one really is a man'. Of course he is, why else would I marry him.

Now, with teen age daughters its time for them to learn. We don't live near the border and they've grown up in a different world. They don't understand what they missed, sex is a taboo subject and are embarrassed when I show their father affection. They tell me they will never marry an old man, he's ten years older, and that's like ancient in their mind. By the time we were their age, the women talked about sex openly, bragging about their men, teasing the young girls. My daughters hide in their room, 'it's a vagina Mom, not a 'cuevita del amor'. They don't know what they're missing.