Wounded by beauty, a little girl wondered, ‘What’s wrong with me?! Where is my penis? Did God cut it off? Because I was bad?’ She tried to pee standing up, but that didn’t work very well. She overheard her mother laughing about it to her father. She didn’t understand why losing a body part was something to laugh about. Kneeling for bedtime prayers, she crossed herself and asked The Lord her soul to take if she should die before she became awake.
When the girl turned 13, she found a book in the public library, a book written by someone named Sigmund Freud. As she took the book off the shelf, she noticed it smelled musty, that it hadn’t been checked out in six years. Immersed, she turned page after page and learned that many girls and boys ask themselves the same question. Girls wonder why their penises have been removed and boys wonder whether it will happen to them.
She didn’t check the book out because it was about sex, and her parents didn’t want her to know about sex. She’d have to come to the library to read it. She crossed her fingers that no one would check it out.