CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

The first 10 years of my life were punctuated by occasional episodes of pure hell (painful infected penis, or embarrassment & terror caused by clumsy, insensitive doctors who yanked the foreskin back while muttering about smegma & my need to be circumcised) followed by months of inattention (benign neglect?). At last, by age 10 years and 3 months, I managed to stretch & loosen my foreskin so that it became easy to retract at any time.

That was the end of any physical problem but by then the idea had been firmly implanted that there was Something Wrong With Me that would have to be remedied some day by circumcision. (I eventually got it done--after having tried dorsal slit which several of my college roommates had experienced and lived with quite happily--but by then the psychological harm had been done.) I believed that as "damaged goods" I would never be able to make a successful marriage.

I truly feel that this had an inimical effect on my psychic makeup, and I am convinced that without the wrongly-treated foreskin problems of my early life, my later life wouldn't have been the emotional mess it often has been.