My mother could not have picked a worse time to teach me about sex.

One night, when I was five years old, she turned on the TV to a special about sex education. Kids my brother Danny’s age were holding bags of flour, calling them their “babies,” and scrambling to find “babysitters” for them.

“Why are they doing that?” I said.

“They’re learning about babies, how to take care of them, and how they’re made,” she said.

“Oh.” I knew the last part: they were made in their mothers’ bellies. I had seen my mother pregnant with my sister. But now the kids on the screen were in a classroom, and a teacher was talking to them about cells and body parts.

“What’s she talking about?” I said.

“She’s explaining sex to them.”

I had heard that word before. I knew it was a loaded term, something grown‑ups only said in whispers. “What is that?”

“It’s how you make a baby,” she said, and went on to describe the most absurd, unappealing process I could imagine.

“You did that?” I blurted out. She nodded, and with a sickening feeling I counted up myself, my brothers and sister, and realized she must have done it at least five times. “Any other questions?”

I had only one more. “When you did it, did you say ‘Whoa’?”

My mother had the best of intentions. She made it clear this was not something to be discussed in polite company, that it needed to be kept a secret. But I had a tendency to blurt out secrets. I have always been compulsively honest, and usually at the wrong time. Five months earlier I had ruined my father’s birthday surprise party by asking, “You don’t know about our cakes, right?”

Objectively speaking, sex seemed shockingly gross and ridiculous. But as the shock wore off, the world felt different. I could tell that sex was a Big Deal. It was something new and exciting, a secret grown‑ups kept to themselves. Just knowing about it made me feel powerful. I had to tell someone.

And I had a big scene on the set of Mrs. Doubtfire the next day.

We were shooting a scene where we helped Sally Field choose a dress to wear to her birthday party. Her ex‑husband, Robin Williams, has been denied custody of his kids, and to spend more time with them, he answers her ad for a housekeeper and nanny. Robin, dressed in full drag as an eccentric Scottish nanny named Mrs. Doubtfire, was supposed to come in, ask about the party, and realize he had a major conflict. Lisa Jakub would say her line, then I would say mine. But I wasn’t focusing on the scene. I was bubbling with excitement, because I knew this thing, this big open secret, and I could not keep it in any longer.

My mother had stressed that sex was something that only happened when you were married, so when Virginia, one of the hairdressers, came over to touch up my bangs, I impulsively asked her, “Are you married?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “So you’ve done it, right?”

She looked surprised, then laughed, embarrassed. She didn’t answer, and I felt unsatisfied. As soon as she walked away I announced in a singsong voice, “I KNOW ABOUT SE‑EX! I KNOW ABOUT SE‑EX!”

The whole crew was laughing, and I was giddy. They knew that I knew what they knew! I was triumphant, full of pure childish glee—until I saw my mother standing off to the side of the set. She was enraged. When my mother was angry, she was terrifying. She looked like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, or Emma Goldman’s mug shot. How many times had she lectured me about behaving properly on the set? How many times in our conversation had she stressed that this was not something to talk about in public? How had I forgotten both of these things?

Courtesy of Penguin Random House.

I immediately stopped singing, and with a sinking feeling I knew I had done something bad, and that I was going to be in deep trouble. Instantly, I felt humiliated, and worst of all, I knew I had brought it all on myself. I thought I might start crying. I wanted to apologize, tell my mother I would never do it again, anything to get that scary look off her face and rescue what was left of my pride.