Condoms may not be 100% effective, but they protect against pregnancy and STDs far better than Jesus.
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Having said good bye to all my friends as Sex 2.0, I headed to my car for the long drive north. It was Mother’s Day weekend and I wanted to be home with my children when they woke up that next morning as I have always been these past years. I would have hours on that drive home to think and process all I had learned that day at Sex 2.0 and all of the people I had met. By the time I arrived home it was late and I was totally worn out. I found my son still awake and in the kitchen as I walked in, so we spent time chatting and catching up on his weekend. Lugging my stuff into my bedroom I reflected on how different my life was now than just a short year ago. So many things had changed for me and one of them was the way I viewed my relationship with my children. I was now the mom who handed her son the NYC condoms and lectured him on the importance of safe sex. It was the sound of my phone ringing a few hours later that woke me up. Upon answering it I heard those dreaded words “Mom, you need to come outside.” “What? I’m sleeping” I replied. I told him I would talk to him tomorrow. But the next reply scared me even more. “Mom, you HAVE to come out here.” Out of bed I climbed and made my way outside to find my two sons sitting together. Confusion started to set in. They were both alive, sober (or semi-sober) and I didn’t see the police anywhere around. As I sat down the older one looked at me and said “Eric has something he needs to tell you.” If you are a parent you know how these are the last words you ever want to hear, especially in the middle of the night from one of your children. I turned to Eric and encouraged him to talk to me. Looking me in the eye he said “Mom, I’m bisexual.” Huh? Is that all, I thought to myself. Then I looked at this child of mine. This child who has been struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. I thought back on the past year or so of his life and the signs of his struggle and unhappiness. I looked at this child who was now opening up to me finally and looking for my acceptance. It was then I thought of all the people I now have in my life. I thought of the ones who have struggled for acceptance from their families and at that moment I could not for the life of me understand how their parents could not accept both them and their lives. I looked at my son with happiness and love and said “I will love you no matter what,” and “I don’t care if you like boys, girls or pineapples; it will never change who you are,” and “These are your life choices and I will support you in them no matter what,” and “All I want for you is happiness and a clean room.” As I sat with my two children in the late night cool air talking about all of this I thought to myself if only they knew where I had just spent my weekend. See, my children are still not fully aware of the life I lead now but that night they fully benefited from it. We talked about being bisexual and the thoughts people have about it. The old question of whether men are really bisexual or just one step away from gay. None of this conversation surprised me. Thinking back I always “knew” this about him. When the conversation turned to telling his Dad it was no surprise to me when he said he would not tell him and did not want me to either. Growing up with a conservative Republican Dad has made if difficult for him to be himself around him. As the night air grew cooler I bugged my two sons to move inside to finish our talk. It was now very late, cold and I was exhausted. As we all curled up on the sofas together, the conversation moved to the condoms I had given them. One son complained that they were too small. At that point as I tried to stay awake the conversation moved between my two sons and why one could fit into these condoms and one could not. I started to hear numbers with the word “inches” after it and wondered how did I end up in the middle of this. How did I end up late at night with my two children cuddled on the sofa while they discussed the size of their respective manhoods? Who was I now? And then it came to me. I was a mom and I was Diva. I had learned so much in the last year and I was now sharing that with my children. This new person I had become with all the knowledge and understanding that they needed at this point in their lives. I looked at them and thought back to all the years we had these moments together alone. I thought about the difficult changes they were going through in this family now and how much I had worried about them because of it. And then I saw our future together. A future of us together late at night discussing sexuality, condoms and penis size along with their need to clean their rooms. Happiness surrounded me at that moment with the love I had for my children. I turned to my son who had chosen that night to come out to me and said with humor in my voice, “You know some children give their mothers flowers for Mother’s Day,” thinking about how ironic it was that Diva’s son would come out on Mother’s Day. My children have benefited from my online life and friendships. The next day I was able to share this with my friends and look to them for help. I asked them for books, resources and support groups for my son as he worked through accepting this about himself. Mother’s Day has become even more special for me now. My 17 year old son had been dating the same girl for several months. This was his first “real” girlfriend. I figured that sooner or later they were going to be having sex. He’d been given many talks about love, sex, disease, pregnancy – the whole ball of wax; so to speak, from the time he was old enough to start asking questions. I felt confident that he would do the right thing especially when it came to protection. Condoms had been discussed and his responsibility. I didn’t think that I had to go into the minute details about condoms. He took his girl to see the fireworks that 4th of July. We live in a coastal state and the display was done by the ocean. Long lonely stretches of beach, night, blankets … you get the picture. The following morning, I was picking up discarded clothing from the bathroom floor when a small black package fell out of his pants pocket. I scooped it up and glanced at it before tossing it away. There was a happy little condom man smiling up at me announcing in day-glo color that inside was a “Glow in the Dark” condom made in China! When my son made his appearance later that morning, I mentioned that I didn’t think using a condom with questionable origins was very smart and in the future he should use better judgment when selecting his protection because it was very important. Unfazed that I had found the wrapper but was also lecturing on the quality of his condom and that I now knew he wasn’t a virgin, his reply was, “Mom, it WAS the 4th of July!” Sometimes you just have to admit defeat and hope for the best. My mum and I had exactly two talks about sex, and the first was only brushing up against it. She had gone to the chiropractor, and we were on our way to wherever. I was old enough to read, so I could have been 6, but I think I was older–maybe 8. I was reading the brochure she’d picked up in the doctor’s office, and one of the things the brochure claimed chiropractors could help with was menstrual cramps. Well, me being the curious child, I asked what that was. My mum explained about periods and how when a man and woman have sex, that blood goes to the baby. I don’t remember much of the exact wording. I just remember being mortified that my little sister was in the backseat hearing all of this. In between the “official” talks, I read voraciously. My mum was always a big reader herself–of romance novels. One day she said, “You have to read this book.” She marked out a couple of paragraphs in the back that I wasn’t allowed to read, and I didn’t read them. The text after didn’t make much sense, as the couple was aglow from lovemaking and I had no idea what was going on. Eventually I decided I needed more context and read the last paragraph between Mum’s lines. Then the whole forbidden passage. I remember the day I announced that I was going to read other books by that author. Mum said, “Okay.” Then I just shifted into reading other romances as well. These books provided a lot of my sex education, though it was a very vague education and it wasn’t till I was in high school–late high school–that I got a clearer picture of what sex really was. The next “official” talk came about 15 years after the first. I was involved with N., and I was telling my mum about a camping trip we took. “And you slept in separate tents, right?” I gave her a look. She said she was just kidding and told me to be careful. By that time I’d had 3 or 4 partners and I knew most of what I needed to in order to protect myself. I was educated about birth control–and I was taking it–and I used condoms with all my partners. I think I got lucky–I didn’t have much sex ed from either parents or school, but didn’t end up like so many women in my family: having a baby before they were ready. I suppose I have to credit my religion at least a little bit; if I hadn’t been uber-Christian, I wouldn’t have been set on waiting for sex. By the time I changed my religion, I was educated and ready for sex. First, I’ll say that my parents did their absolute best. They are lovely people. But it’s a tough job, being a parent. My younger brother (I’m a guy, too) learned when he was about eleven that one could find really excellent stuff in the trash people threw out. He and a buddy of his would get up early on trash day and scout the neighborhood on their bikes. They actually found an old TV that worked pretty well one time. Most of the other stuff they got was not useful to anyone but a preteen or young teenage boy. To them, these things were treasures. I wasn’t all that interested in their stuff, but one day, they hit the mother lode. They came into the house with two sagging garbage bags of all kind of porn–back when porn came on paper and was harder to come by than logging in. For days we read through this stuff. A lot of it was kinkier than we though possible (enemas!). But most of it was Playboy, Oui, Penthouse, that kind of thing. We read the letters, the articles (which were mostly beyond us) and the ads. My parents knew–they took away the extreme stuff. But to their credit, they let us look at the rest. The ads got me. You could buy “prophylactics.” I didn’t know what those were, but I tended to the bookish, even then. I looked up the word in the dictionary. A prophylactic is a “preventative.” This was no help. “Remember, you can always ask us anything.” So I asked my mom what a prophylactic was. I was twelve or thirteen at the time. Late 1970s. She looked horrified. “I think you’re too young for that.” That was it. I found out a few years later. But my theory in raising my kids has been that if they’re old enough to wonder, they’re old enough to know. And if anyone’s reading this who doesn’t know–they’re condoms. “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. (With apologies to The Rolling Stones) That first night I spent with Heather, the first of ten thousand or more, made me realise that I never wanted to spend a night alone again. That warmth and closeness, the feel and smell of another human being right there next to me all night long until I woke to find her still there the next day was something I had never before experienced in my 20 years. The sex came later. I had slept with my underpants on that first night. I’m not quite sure why. I was certainly shy, repressed, inexperienced and unsure of myself. My church upbringing had warned me of the dire consequences of just this type of thing and not taking all my clothes off was maybe symbolic of not going all the way. Heather could have taken matters into her own hands, dragged them off me and taught me all I needed to know there and then: She certainly had the experience which I lacked. She could have laughed in my face or taken offence at me not grabbing with both hands the golden opportunity she was presenting so freely to me. She did none of those things. She was gentle and patient and she didn’t rush things. She slept in her knickers as well that night. We kissed and cuddled, she let me explore her, let me feel what it was like to be explored and we masturbated each other. We spent long rainy Saturday afternoons, that autumn of 1977, slowly discovering more and more about each other. Because my background had made me somewhat reticent and because contraception was something of a problem, actual vaginal penetrative sex was only a small part of our relationship, so we explored a whole range of other experiences besides. Things that many other couples perhaps only arrive at much further into a relationship but which for us have been an integral part of our love play right from the very start. Like fisting, for example. Like anal. Not so much oral, strangely. Whereas I quickly discovered the delights of tasting her moist, fragrant cunt, I hope Heather will forgive me if I say that giving oral was not her favourite activity back then. Heather wasn’t on the pill at the time. She explained that she didn’t dare while she was living at home because she knew that however well she hid them her mother would be sure to find them and that would inevitably lead to a huge row. Yet another huge row. How she managed to avoid getting pregnant before she came to England is something of a mystery. In any case, she hadn’t left her home town to become embroiled in a relationship. Quite the reverse. The previous couple of years had seen her school grades slide in inverse proportion to her interest in the local boys and she didn’t want that to happen while at university. Condoms were available of course, although not as widely as they are now. These were the days pre-HIV, and when chlamydia was something we learned about in Pathology classes but were never likely to encounter, so ’safe sex’ as we now know it simply wasn’t an issue. Our hall of residence was right in the heart of the City of London, so there were no convenient pubs or shops nearby. There was a Durex machine in the toilets at the hall, built like a tank and covered in hilarious graffiti such as ”Buy me and stop one”, ”This chewing gum tastes funny” and, beneath the logo declaring the contents to conform to British Standard 3704, the inscription: ”So was the Titanic”. Problem was that the thing was so noisy that you could hear the drawer being yanked out and slammed shut way down the corridor. It was the thought of being discovered in the act by a fellow member of The Christian Union that kept me well away from that machine… (To be continued) “What is HIV?” We had passed a city bus with an advertisement for free HIV testing on June 27, which is National HIV Testing day. And I know we have had this conversation before. But it doesn’t hurt to have it again. He turns thirteen on Saturday. As far as we know, he isn’t too interested in the opposite sex, but he’s told us he’s straight. He’s more interested in airsoft guns, shooting black powder, and his bike. We are ok with that. But we know that these conversations are a necessary part of his education. So I talked about HIV. And AIDS. And how these are transmitted. And how one should not do drugs. And how it’s important to use barriers when one is sexually active. And how those barriers include condoms and dental dams. And how those things protect against most STD’s. And what kinds of other STD’s are out there. And how it’s important to get tested often when one is sexually active with multiple people. And how “often” is every 3-6mos. And how some STD’s are treatable with antibiotics, but some of them have no cure. And some of them can be passed to babies. He sat quiet, taking it all in. He asked a few questions. And then we moved on to a different subject. I know this isn’t going to be the last time I have this conversation – with him or any of the other kids. But I am so glad that he feels comfortable asking his questions. That he knows his questions will get answered. That he knows he can come to me with these questions. It proves that I am a damn good parent. –Submitted by Monkey from They Belong to Us |
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