Lily Be: Throwing Up Tamales

As a 16-year-old, Lily Be gets an unexpected education on the reproductive system.

Lily Be started sharing stories in Chicago by accident in 2010. She never had a want to express herself artistically. This is not something she ever planned on doing. Lily is from the westside of Chicago, born and raised where she's spent most of her days raising her son. Storytelling fell into her lap one day and she's gone on to do crazy amazing wonderful things with it. From winning story competitions that would inspire and oftentimes usher more Latinos and marginalized people to tell their stories, to teaching people from all walks of life to share theirs, Lily has not stopped giving back to the artform that changed and saved her life. Lily produces The Stoop and Story Collider, is an editorial assistant for Story News magazine, and account manager for GoLucky Studios. She teaches storytelling all over the city both in person and online, is writing a book, and hosting a myriad of community and storytelling events. She's half magic, half amazing, and 100% real.

This story originally aired on December 13, 2019 in an episode titled “A Scientist is Born.”

Story Transcript

I don't know if, as the producer of this show, I’m allowed to say this but I’m not that into science. I mean, okay, I take it back. Not that I’m not that into science. I get it. I appreciate it. I watch some Dave Attenborough nature show. I love that shit. I love it, I love it. And I appreciate it for like I could take selfies because of science. I get around. I’m going to Paris because of science. I get to drive cars because of science. But I’m not going to tell you how none of that works. I’m not going to. And not because I don't-- it’s just I didn’t grow up with it. I didn’t.

I grew up in a very Catholic household. God did all that. That’s what God did, all of that. And God does everything and does not, right? So you got the job. That was God. You didn’t get the job. That was God. Everything was God.

When I moved out of my house at 15 and in with my boyfriend’s dad, which is a story for another day and another day, I know my mom and my grandma prayed about it. I know they did. I know they were like, “Por favor, Dios, cuidala.” Like, “Take care of her. I hope she's okay.” Because I moved out.

And I was kind of just thrown into this world of discovery. My boyfriend’s father is a Buddhist limo driver and showed me a world outside of my little 8 by 8-block world that is or was Humboldt Park. This man showed me everything outside of what I knew, which was like for the most part: sushi, I found out like I had tasted sushi for the first time with this man. I saw communities like Hyde Park and Korean restaurants. He introduced me to so much the city has to offer that I did not know.

And so when I lived with him in this little one-bedroom apartment, this was our daily thing. like we would just go out and explore the world. And then we got a two-bedroom apartment and that’s when his son moved in, my boyfriend.

And again, Miguel wasn’t too big on like teaching us anything, telling us anything. He wasn’t a science guy either. Again, he was a Buddhist so that’s a whole different world of just something else takes care of it and not science. And so we weren’t told anything.

Outside of health class, didn’t nobody tell me about my body. Neither Miguel, not my mom, definitely not my Catholic-ass family. No. they're not telling you about your body. You don’t got a body in a Catholic household. Body of Christ. That’s all you got. So when Mike moved in, at the time I had not had my period yet. I’m almost 16 years old. I had not had my period.

And from what I remember at CPS science or health class, if you don’t get a period, you can’t ovulate. If you don’t ovulate, you can’t have babies. So that gave me a free pass and Mike too to fuck like rabbits. That gave us a free pass to just have sex, boyfriend and girlfriend, no protection.

We didn’t even need protection because I can’t get pregnant. I can’t get pregnant if I’m not ovulating, guys. So that’s what we did whenever Mike’s dad was out doing jobs. And we did this for months.

And I remember, oh, gosh, just not really like... again, health class. I wasn’t hearing the horror stories. Like I wasn’t experiencing the horror stories and so I didn’t notice these little kind of changes happening. My sore boobs, that was something else. The little foop that I developed, that’s all that cheese you're eating now. You write that off. You write it off. We wrote off every little thing, because I’m not ovulating. I’m not getting my period.

And then I go with Mike to spend Easter with his mom’s family. And we go spend Easter at Grandma Alma’s and she makes tamales for Easter. And I love tamales. It’s like my favorite food. My favorite Mexican food is un tamal and I ate probably 18 of these, just shoveled them in. And I ate like 18 tamales, all kinds, and then afterwards we get dropped off at home. We’re living together. Don’t judge us.

And I get home and I sit down to relax and all of a sudden I’m just like I got to go use the bathroom. I’m full. I ate a lot of tamales. Before I could sit down to pee, I get the urge to just blaah, I throw up red, white and like green chicken, red pork and cheese tamales, all in the toilet, just blaah.

And I step out of the bathroom and I look at Mike and he's like, “You all right?”

And I’m like, “I think I’m pregnant.”

And he's like, “What? What are you talking about? What makes you say that?”

I was like, “Look, I’m Mexican and I never in my Mexican live thrown up a tamale, ever. Ever.”

And without question, he was like, “Oh, yeah, you pregnant.”

No test required. That was our test right there. “Yeah, you pregnant, “ and so now we’re like, “But who do we tell? Who are we telling?”

And I was like, “It’s not going to be my Catholic-ass family. We are not telling my Catholic mom that I got pregnant at your house because, no. That’s not going to happen. We still get whoopins. That’s not going to happen.” So we agree that we’re going to call his mother Angie.

So we tell Angie and it’s like she had it in like a playbook, waiting. She was waiting on this day. It’s like as soon as he moved out, she had it turned to this page, that bitch is getting pregnant. Like she already knew. Because real talk, as soon as we called her she was like, “Okay, so you're going to move in with me and we’re going to go see, we’re going to go confirm the pregnancy and we’re going to go and see that everything is... before we jump to conclusions we’re going to make sure.”

Sure enough, it happened like this fast. The next day or two we were already at the clinic. I get to the clinic. I’m just sitting there like, “When was your last period?”

“Never had one.”

“What? Come here. Sit down.”

They put me in a chair. I’m sitting in a chair and a little table with a little paper and I lift up my shirt. And without a test, she's like, “Oh, darling, you are like in your second trimester.” I was five-and-a-half months pregnant. They put the jelly on my belly right then and there, and did the little science sonogram, whatever the word is. The little sciencey word where it’s like a baby just [makes heartbeat noises] that’s what you hear.

I heard my son’s heartbeat that day and I started crying kind of like, “Oh, my gosh.”

And then Mike’s mom is like tears of joy and tears of sadness, because she's like, “My first grandchild.” You know, it’s like kind of a mix for her.

Then we go home and we tell Mike and he's like, “Oh, you are pregnant.” And we tell him like second trimester. And he's like, “What?”

Because what? It turns out I had been having my period. It just wasn’t the horror story that I heard from all my friends or how it was explained. I was still shedding the lining, you know, it’s the uterine lining. I just wasn’t bleeding profusely. I was discharging but I was writing that off as sex stuff. That’s just some sex stuff.

And I had to have a baby in four months. When most people have like nine months to do I had to do it in four months. And then I have this baby. And the postpartum sets in because I’m like, “Stupid baby,” and the baby didn’t have a fault. There was no fault. It wasn’t his fault but I’m mad at the community of people that should have told me about my body.

Science had failed me, you guys. Like no anatomy, no physiology, no like, “There's a difference. There's a spectrum of period.” Nothing. Like I got none of that. And now I’m stuck having a baby and then everybody else gets to go live their none-baby life while I raise a baby.

And I do. I guess, right? I mean you play the hand you're dealt. But I did know this. I knew like, “Okay, well, now this is the hand that I am dealt. What am I going to do different with this hand?”

And I’m like, “This baby is going to know everything. Whether he likes it or not this baby is going to know everything. There is not going to be a story. This baby is going to know the story, that’s for sure, how this baby came to be.” And that’s what I did. I spared no detail. The fucking like rabbits, heard that. He heard all of that. Because I want to believe that because I did that, because I took that moment, damn, what moment, that I was able to then do something different.

I’m hoping that in encouraging this get to know, know everything, know everything that that’s what encouraged my baby to study science later in his life. Maybe. I want to believe that. And as my mom would say, “You know, probably. Who knows? Maybe God.” Thank you.