The Miseducation of the Birds & Bees

It started with Lauryn.

I had just come back from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. One of those long summer stays with my father's side of the family. My Puerto Rican grandmother ran that house with an iron fist wrapped in a Bible. The kind of woman who taught you to serve men first, sit with your legs crossed and push my sisters and me to be "ladylike," which meant quiet, neat, and deferential. Back there, girlhood was rigid. There was one way to be, and it looked like Sunday service pressed into a daily routine, where children were ignored if they forgot to greet their elders with “bendición."

In the summer of 1998, I was supposed to come home to more freedom. A time when my mother and her sisters were busy toiling with work would allow me to run the streets in my true tomboy nature with my cousin and the neighborhood kids. We'd ride our bikes across the heat of the Bronx streets and make runs to the corner store for quarter waters and sunflower seeds. But that summer, I brought back something else with me. A tinge of heat behind my ears when I would hear someone on the radio say, "That thing."

My mother had managed to get a bootleg version of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill about a month before its official release from the Ghanaian guy who paced up and down White Plains Road selling CDs, DVDs, and incense from a duffel bag. That CD became my guiding light. I didn't just listen to every song, I absorbed them. I let Lauryn's music teach me about heartbreak, self-respect, spiritual reckoning, the ache of motherhood, and the joy of self-love. It was a revelation. My first real understanding of what it might mean to be a woman, in theory, since I was only nine.

"Doo Wop (That Thing)" and its music video had taken hold of me like gospel. Watching it as a girl in 1998 felt like looking into two mirrors. One reflected where we had been, and the other showed where we could go. Lauryn, styled in vintage mod fits and sporting a beehive hairdo on the left side of the screen, channeled the grace and soul of Aretha Franklin, who had also risen to fame as a young Black mother finding her voice in the 1960s. But on the right side of the frame was the Lauryn. I knew her head wrapped, mic in hand, commanding a block party in the Bronx like a hip-hop griot. The split-screen wasn't just an aesthetic choice. It was a generational portal. Through it, I saw how womanhood had shifted from stoic and silenced to loud, layered, and liberated. Lauryn wasn't just comparing eras. She was also embodying the spectrum of what it meant to be a Black woman with a message.

For me, raised on both '60s Motown and '90s Hot 97, this duality felt personal. The video showed that somewhere between girdles and low-rise jeans, between letting a man leave quietly and telling him not to be a hard rock when you really are a gem, something had cracked open. Feminism wasn't just theory. It was choreography and deliberate creative choices. In 1967, Lauryn had a band of men behind her. By 1998, her backup band was all women, all rhythm, all power. She was no longer seeking attention, but she still demanded it. That block party was a reimagining of community where the woman on the mic wasn't the background but the focal point. Lauryn's video for this shy girl who infiltrated male spaces insisted on it. It showed me that evolution isn't only about what we wear or how we sing but also about how we take up space, how we command the crowd, and how we rewrite the script in real time.

I didn't fully know what Lauryn meant by "that thing," but the song spun in my bones. It wasn't just catchy. It felt like permission. When the hook dropped:

"How you gon' win when you ain't right within?"

I'd mouth it like it was written for me. I'd leap off couches and run across crowded halls, singing like I was performing a reenactment of the video on the VMA stage.

While Bronx girlhood was expected to be filled with double dutch, learning to cornrow, and passing notes about crushes, my experience was different. I spent most of my time horsing around with the boys, racing bikes, scraping my knees on the sidewalk, and pouring over liner notes and lyrics. I'd watch music videos with a hungry attention, then look up the symbolism and motifs the adults around me never explained. I was a gifted student, sharp and intuitive, which helped my mother evade some of the judgment people cast her way for being so young.

But so much of what she did was guesswork. My grandmother passed when my mom was just 21. I lived with my aunts until I was about nine, and in many ways, my mother and I were growing up at the same time. She had no real blueprint for raising a daughter in America, let alone in a place like the Bronx when her roots were planted in Jamaican soil.

One evening, lost in the rhythm and Ms. Hill's words, my mom stopped me.

"Do you know what ‘that thing’ actually is?"

I froze. Not because I knew the answer but because I didn't. Whether she knew it or not, my mom had a way of slicing through the air with her questions, turning even casual moments into something more profound. She stood there in the doorway near her bedroom, arms folded, eyes narrow with curiosity, not judgment, inviting me into a deeper conversation about Lauryn's message.

Behind her, my stepfather was posted up in the living room, absorbed in his PlayStation. The rest of the house was humming with weekend normalcy—encyclopedias and CDs scattered across my bedroom floor, the smell of Comet still clinging to the tub, and a laundry basket full of clothes for me to fold.

"Come here," she said, patting the bed beside her.

I sat.

My mother had me at sixteen. I didn't really understand what that meant until that day. Sure, I knew it numerically. She was twenty-five, and I was nine, which meant we were closer in age than most mother-daughter duos, well maybe not in the '80s. But that was the first time I saw her not just as my mother but as someone who had once been a girl. A girl like me.

I don't remember everything she said, but I remember how her voice softened. She didn't stutter or blush or fumble. She explained sex in plain language, clear and firm, with the same energy she used when teaching me how to wash rice or separate the whites from the colors when doing laundry.

"You know you're gonna start changing soon," she said, matter-of-fact. "That thing everyone's singing about… people act like it's just physical, but it's more than that. It's power. And people will try to take it from you before you even know what you got."

I nodded, trying to soak in her words while tracing the geometric burgundy and green pattern on her bedsheet with my finger. The conversation didn't scare me. If anything, it felt like armor.

What I didn't realize at the time was how rare that moment truly was. As I got older, I learned that many of my friends never got the birds-and-bees talk. Some were left to piece things together from rumors in locker rooms or from hushed gossip on the school bus. Others absorbed messages from rap videos and glossy teen magazines that either warned us to protect ourselves or promised us we'd be loved if we just did it right. But few of them had a mother who sat them down and said, clearly and calmly, "This is what that thing is." Most of them didn't get words—they got silence. And silence, more than anything, breeds shame.

My mother's honesty didn't just shape how I came to understand my body; it also shaped how I learned to advocate for it. Her desire to be transparent, even without a full roadmap of her own, gave me a foundation to speak boldly about things most people kept in the dark. I grew into a woman who names discomfort out loud. Who teaches her son to honor consent. Who demands better language and deeper care when navigating doctors' offices, relationships, and even school systems. I know what a boundary is, and I know how to set one. Not because I learned it in a book but because my mother, with all her youth and uncertainty, gave me a story instead of silence. She chose to be brave with her voice so I could be brave with mine.

And all that started with my love for Lauryn.

Some nights after, she asked me about that thing, we watched 15 and Pregnant on Lifetime. At the beginning of the movie, the teen boy is seen unbuttoning the girl's pants. Usually, if an explicit scene like this came on during a film, most adults would make me and every other child in the room cover our eyes or change the channel entirely. But this time, she let it play. I watched a teenage girl learn she was pregnant, watched her body change and her friends disappear, and watched the boy fumble through denial and false promises. I watched the main character's mother struggle between anger and support. I watched and was never told to look away.

I was shy and observant, a quiet girl who paid close attention to adults even when they thought I wasn't listening. After watching that movie, I saw my mom in a different light. She wasn't just the woman who braided my hair too tight or brought home snacks from her job. She had lived the life of a high school senior with a newborn and imagined she lived a life much like the main character of that movie.  At that moment, I remembered a flash from my past, when I was two, sitting on my grandmother's lap as she shushed me at my mom's graduation, watching her walk across the stage in a white cap and gown.

My mother's question about "that thing" and the movie was meant to protect me. To prepare me. But the world had other lessons.

A few months later, a boy in my fifth-grade class brought in a stack of playing cards—pink with yellow accents and couples on them who weren't playing games. The kind of cards older brothers hid in shoeboxes or under their mattresses. He called us over during lunch and told us the man in one picture was "peeing milk." That's what he said. Another kid laughed and said it reminded him of learning to squirt milk from his nose.

But I knew what was happening. I didn't say anything. I just watched the other girls giggle and look away, their cheeks flushed red. No teacher found out. No adult asked what we were whispering about. We were left to our own devices, as kids often were in the '90s. We filled in the blanks with half-truths and bold guesses.

It reminded me of another boy I encountered in kindergarten. One day, our teacher stepped out to use the bathroom. In the quiet corner of the classroom, he pulled his pants down and showed us everything. Just like that. No warning. A few girls squealed and ran. I froze. I didn't have the language then to name what it was, but I knew it was wrong. I knew it wasn't a game.

No one ever told. I think we were too embarrassed. Too unsure of what counted as "serious" or "dangerous." The memory clung to me like smoke. I didn't know it then, but these moments would start to shape my understanding of womanhood, of safety, of desire and violation.

Even with all my mom's preparation. Even with Lauryn in my headphones and lessons from Lifetime, I wasn't immune. That talk didn't protect me from everything. Especially not later, when things got real. When a boy didn't listen. When I said no and, it didn't matter. When the world reminded me that power, even when named, isn't always enough to stop someone from trying to take it.

But looking back now, I realize that moment on the bed. My mom's choice to speak plainly, without shame or scolding, was a kind of liberation in itself. She gave me knowledge, not fear. And she gave it to me early when it still had a chance to root itself deep. I wonder if the girl still inside my twentysomething mother knew I needed that or if her naivety didn't allow her to forget what it means to be a kid like most parents do.

I didn't always feel protected, but I felt seen.

Black girlhood is full of contradictions. You're told to be modest and magical. Desired and desexualized. Loud and invisible all at once. But what Lauryn gave me, and what my mom reinforced, was the permission to know myself. To honor my voice. To ask questions, even the ones grown folks didn't want to answer.

I carry that now.

Every time I make a decision, whether it be about love, about my body, about what I let into my spirit, Lauryn's voice echoes through my mind:

"How you gon' win, when you ain't right within?"

That thing? It's not shameful. It's not to be hidden, hoarded, or handed away without thought. It's mine. And I'm right within.