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“Oh,” he says, “you’re one of those liberal moms.” No, I think, I’m one of those realistic moms. My fifteen year old daughter was in a relationship (that lasted another year and a half), and sexually active. Allowing her boyfriend to sleep over at our house seemed pretty much like a no-brainer to me.
The alternatives – telling her she was too young, shouting: “Not under my roof!” or just pretending it wasn’t happening – seemed to me not only irresponsible, but hypocritical. Any way you chose to look at it, she and I were statistics, and I never really had the option of pulling any kind of moralistic card. Her father and I split up before she was born, and she has never met him: it’s not as though I could pretend she got here through anything but a contraception blip, and even before that, I was a teen pregnancy statistic. Having an abortion was my choice, and one that continued to haunt me until I got pregnant again six years later. It wasn’t a choice I wanted her to have to make if I could avoid it, and in that respect being Liberal Mom gave me a huge advantage: I could corner them both in the kitchen and lecture them about birth control.
Quite apart from the pitfalls of pregnancy, I also wasn’t stupid enough to imagine that a mother saying feebly: “I think you’re too young” would stop a teenager all hyped up on hormones and first love from having sex. If they weren’t having sex in a bed with parental consent, then where would they be having it? Yes, I know everyone looks back with nostalgia remembering half-clothed fumbles in the back of a car, but round about where we live that tends to happen in the woods, with the drug dealers and worse: around the time this conversation was taking place, a woman was murdered and set fire to in her car by her ex-lover, in those same woods. I had to at least learn the lesson my parents learnt the hard way: all you get from ignoring teenage sex is grandchildren (and to their credit, the grandparents did learn their lesson: it was her grandmother who marched her off to be put on the Pill).
We live in a small, religious town. Here I wasn’t regarded so much as Liberal Mom as Bad Mom, but I didn’t see that burying my head in the sand was much of an option. I could remember my own wild youth well enough to recognize that when other mothers told me self-righteously that their daughters weren’t smoking, drinking, having sex and skipping school “because she would never do anything like that” they were fooling themselves. My Bad Momness at least meant that I wasn’t spared the reality: you can’t fool someone who knows all the signs, and if you encourage honesty and try your damndest to not be non-judgmental, you at least have the option of bombarding your offspring with facts about risk-control, which is more effective than pretending none of it is happening, because of course you brought your child up better than that.
It still astonishes me how many parents are willing to suspend belief. Now, as never before, our children are able to make informed choices about sex. Our culture glorifies it: everywhere is the message that sex is desirable and to be sexy is aspirational. The upside of that is greater access to information: although there will always be the invaluable hands-on (so to speak) learning process of sex, much of the confusing and often misleading mystery is gone. While it is perfectly reasonable to assume that one’s 15 year old is not sexually active, it’s unfeasible to assume that a teenager with internet access won’t have a more informed opinion about it than we probably did. My only quibble with my daughter was that I wanted to be sure she was doing it for the right reasons and wasn’t being coerced, so when she told me cheerfully that she most definitely wanted it, my main aim was to make sure she was properly protected. At this point, I morphed into Embarrassing Mom, bellowing: “Condoms!” down the stairs after her every time she went out.
I’d love to say that my policy of openness meant that my daughter’s teenage years were a breeze, but they were pretty much pure unadulterated hell, and it didn’t stop her going off the rails pretty spectacularly. At times I regretted my mantra of keep the channels of communication open, and quite often I’d really rather have not known, but I gritted my teeth and kept at it, mainly because I couldn’t see any other way of doing it. And it did pay off, eventually: at 21 she’s making a pretty decent stab at being a responsible adult, and claims to be grateful for all the unwanted understanding and advice she was offered in her wild youth.
Your post hit a nerve for me. I was a single Dad and I was completely delusional. I think the only thing that saved my daughter from teen preganancy was her decision to be “a lesbian” for her high school career.
As it was that phase ended at 19, and by the time she was 21 I was a grandfather.
I remember crying when she told me. So much of our pervasive media culture glorifies sex, and none of the populous really has a grip on how to communicate with teens about sex. I think if I’d have read your post a decade ago it might have changed my life. I know it would have changed hers.
Thank you, Eddie. I hope Z, this post’s author, sees your comment.
I think this is fabulous Z! So many people seem to make this assumption that sexuality can only come into play at 18 or 21-which is ridiculous. We all had those feelings, but we ran risks in the woods, someone’s basement, etc.
I know it much have been hard, and I anticipate it to be hard with my girls, but I hope I can be as strong as you have been, and as rational when the time comes.
Me too. :)