Sex and the Colony part one

Most women would get pregnant soon after they got married.  As children, we knew that after marriage most women’s bodies got bigger right away.  We were told that when a girl gets married, that’s when she becomes a woman and her body just changes into a woman’s body.

If anyone was brave enough to ask how this would happen, we were told to shame ourselves for asking such questions and we would know when it would happen to us, not if, but when.

  

Women wore loose fitting cloths to hide their pregnancies, especially from the kids; they were never to know what was going on.  

It was shameful for the women to walk around noticeably pregnant, because people would know, then, what she had done to get that way.  When we saw a Mexican women that was noticeably pregnant or breastfeeding her baby, we were told not to look at her. It was rude to stare.

“They have no shame.” “They” simply meant people of the world: non-Mennonite people. We did those things in private, we didn’t show the world “everything,” which meant Mennonite women breastfed in private.  

So no one would ever see Mennonite women breastfeeding their babies and wearing tight cloths to show pregnant belly’s.  “They don’t have rules like we do.”  We were to live by these rules, no questions asked.

Women would use opportunities like that to (sort of) tell us things that were expected of us. I always figured they used those short windows of opportunity to tell us things so that we wouldn’t ask questions.  

We clearly knew what they were talking about without actually being told directly. We knew in terms of dressing and how to behave when we got married, but how we would get that “women shaped body,” we would figure it out and learn as it happened to us.  

  

There were people who never left their colony, especially the ones that lived far from the town of Nuevo Ideal.  So they never had opportunities to talk about sex and pregnancy, the birds and the bees.  

Sometimes girls got pregnant and had no clue that sex would have such huge consequences.  Nobody ever said DO NOT HAVE SEX, or described WHAT SEX IS and that WHEN YOU DO THIS YOU WILL GET PREGNANT. 

From the age of 13 on Sunday afternoons from 1-5 in the afternoon, we would go out to a friend’s house or go out to the street of our Colony, and we were just told schmock senne (to behave).  We were supposed to know what that meant without an explanation.  

Some of us knew exactly what our parents meant to the point where we would just run and hide from the boys that wanted to talk to us.  That way there could be no confusion about what schmock senne meant.