https://arminehhelenohanian.com/stories-of-life-2/

I was hardly ten. My father had passed away the year before, and we – a Christian family of five kids and our mother – lived in the city of Arak in Iran. Although I missed my father immensely, I was happy living in our beautiful house with its two-acre green and heavenly land and the magnificent large terrace. What’s more, I adored our huge and bright sunny rooms.

I remember how much fun I had playing in our yard with my cousins when they visited us with their mother in the summer. We would chase each other along the flowerbeds of red, yellow, and white rose bushes and tall trees. Alternatively, we would play in our farm attached to our garden where there were lambs, cows, a white donkey, and some goats. We also had a two-room residence for our head servant in the farm. Now after my father’s death when we could not afford to have any servants, my mother had rented it to our previous servant’s eldest son, Ahmad and his wife.

One day, as I was playing with my cousin, Vartan and his sister, Flora with the baby lambs, we noticed that Ahmad’s door was open. My cousin, who was a prying, naughty boy, peaked his head into their room and called out, “Hey guys come…come and see. This man and his wife are doing something funny on their couch.”

Flora and I immediately left the baby lambs to join Vartan. As we stared into the room, we were amazed to see husband and wife lying on top of each other. I as a nine-year-old girl had no idea what was going on. However, Vartan, who was about my age, began laughing and yelled, “They are busy making a baby.”

I was very shocked. I looked at Flora for an answer. She, who was two years older than Vartan and I, smiled and grabbed our hands and pulled us away.

That day, until the time I went to bed, I kept thinking about what my cousin had said about the couple making a baby.

“Isn’t God the one, who wishes for each child to be born to people?” I kept asking myself. “So how can they make their own baby?”

A week later when my cousins and their mother had gone back to their town but left their youngest brother behind with his aunt, I did something stupid. Their brother must have been around four years old. There was another little girl, who was our neighbor’s child. She would also come to our garden and play.

One morning when I was with the above two kids in the garden, I turned to my little cousin and said, “You know what?”

He asked curiously, “What…what?”

I said, “Why don’t you lie down on the floor with this little girl and make a baby?”

He looked at me strangely and answered, “No. I don’t want to lie down with her. I don’t like her!”

Thinking about it today, I tell myself what a stupid, but curious girl I was.