The birds and the bees...

I vaguely remember learning about the birds and the bees when I was little. I must have been 6 or 7 years old and was obviously starting to ask questions.  I was handed a brightly coloured book with a picture of a smiley, biologically challenged (ie simplified) cartoon couple on the front, possibly holding a swaddled cartoon baby in their arms and looking rather smug.  Inside were more pictures of the smug couple in a rude state of undress, with sentences attached to the pictures, along the lines of:

'A man and a woman who love each other want to be very very close.  When the man stands too close to the woman his penis becomes large and then they make love.  The seed of the man finds the egg inside the woman and nine months later a baby is born...'

That was the general jist of it.  I think somewhere in the middle might have been some pictures of the woman getting fat and the baby freakily smiling at us from inside her transparent tummy.  It also appears that the couple remain in a naked standing position for the entire nine months.

Seriously!?

What they of course do not tell you in these charming, educational little books, is that actually, it is sometimes just not that easy.  Where do they mention that there should be millions of these little seeds, and sometimes there just aren't? I do not recall a page where the smug naked cartoon couple have a struggle with the doctor who tells the man that his seed is deformed, lazy, drunk, stoned, undernourished or unable to make the journey to the woman's shiny little egg?  And neither do they tell you about the endometriosis, the multiple cysts on her ovaries, the hostile environments in her vagina or uterus, or the low egg reserves and hormonal imbalances that she might have.  But fair enough, it was a book written for children, and the shock of all these things come years later, when you realise that sometimes, it just isn't that simple.

If only it were.

And that's where my story begins.