t was surely, I thought, a test from God. He was watching through the windshield to see if I laughed or cracked a grin. My face must have turned chartreuse, but I kept it straight as my mother said the words "penis" and "vagina" out loud. This couldn'’t be THE talk, I thought. Not in the car on the way home from the mall. This couldn't be the same experience everyone else was having with their parents…hearing their moms actually say the words I'd read in Judy Blume and the Where-Did-I-Come-From books. Besides, everyone learns that stuff on the playground anyway.

But the talk did confirm one horrific fact: somehow, he sticks it in there.

It's strange how sex is so foreign when you are nine years old, crouched under the covers with a flashlight and the charts of male and female private parts for a night of uninterrupted study. As a teenager, sex becomes a rite of passage. Later, it's the self-indulgent by-product of too many beers. But never, NEVER, could anyone fathom the ultimate result of the simple act that my mother described: "and the male sticks his penis in the vagina." LSD's got nothing on childbirth.

Picture it, (or remember, as the case may be.) You have sex one night. You've probably had sex with this person more than a thousand times. You aren't really trying to get pregnant, but you'’re not really preventing it either. Then you take a pregnancy test before you go out for drinks one night, just to be sure, and Wa-La! You aren't alone in there anymore. Your belly grows to enormous proportions and you get to eat whatever you want for nine months. You hem and haw over the name of the person-to-be. You nest. You rearrange furniture at four in the morning, cry at the sight of a dead squirrel, and re-caulk the bathtub.

And then one day, after you'’ve read every chapter on childbirth that you can find in Barnes and Noble, you go into labor. Every childbirth story is different, each one amazing in its own way. I'll spare you the details of mine only for a week or two (it's too funny to ignore). But when the baby pops out of your vagina, it is nothing short of the most amazing experience you will ever have. That one little act of sex, hopefully of love (what, we're talking ten minutes?), and BLAM, out comes a little screaming person with eyes and a nose and a weird resemblance of you. "It's a baby!" I swear that's what you say when it comes out. You have no real clue about parenthood until that moment.

So forget rubbers. Forget the pill. The best form of birth control is the simple truth. Sex can change your life. One minute, you are screeching in delight, the next you are covered in baby spit up, your nipples are cracked and bleeding and you can't believe how much diapers cost. After the euphoria passes, you worry about how to pay for college. If you work, you don't want to go back but probably can't afford to stay home. If you don't work, you think about starting a new career and you get pissed off at your husband for spending eight or nine hours at the office when he comes home sniffing around the kitchen for dinner. All of a sudden, you become nostalgic for the quiet darkness of a movie theater. You want to smoke pot again. Your new life has just begun.

Everyone always says to the pregnant couple, in a pat, lilting kind of way, "You'll never be the same." I hate that statement, even if it may be true. You are, after all, still you. Your priorities have changed, but not your personality. And you strive to prove it, so you make it a point to do the things you always have. You go out.

At the end of our first foray into the world as parents reluctantly liberated by a babysitter, I remember sitting impatiently in the passenger seat pressing on the imaginary gas pedal. Faster, FASTER! "You can’t possibly get home fast enough," I plead to my husband. Once upon a time it would be for a good romp in the sack. This time, it was nothing short of a true physical compulsion to be with the very thing I had successfully prevented all these years.