I grew up in a reasonably liberal Orthodox Christian home, and I am Orthodox to this day. I don’t know if it has to do with my parents’ conservatism, or with their feelings concerning my choices and my right to choices, or even if they simply decided that because we were getting sex ed in school, it was unneeded at home, but somehow, they made the decision to refrain from having The Talk with me. To this day, I am profoundly grateful for that choice, as odd as it sounds – I don’t think I could face having that particular chat with my shy, quiet mother, or worse still, my traditional Greek dad. The thought is painful to contemplate! But I still had access to complete, accurate information (we had sex ed in school in grades five, seven, and nine, and I read most of the books in the public library on the subject).
It was never discussed in Sunday school, either (I suppose they assumed that our parents were talking to us about it), but I knew that devout Orthodox Christians were supposed to wait until marriage to have sex. It’s a choice that I question almost every day (with my boyfriend, you would too, believe me), but one that I know in the end is appropriate for me, at least for now. It is not a choice I wish to impose on anyone else, but I do wish that others would respect my right to that choice. Being as liberal as I am in most other aspects of my life, my friends are always stunned when they hear that I’m a virgin, and they immediately question my choice: have I not met the right guy, am I scared, is it a self-esteem issue, am I just not on birth control yet…?
I feel that this is an aspect of sexual education that is often neglected: it is absolutely crucial that every young adult receive accurate information about sex, contraception, STIs, pregnancy, abortions, and all the rest, but it is just as important that we make it clear that choosing to not be sexually active is equally valid, and not a sign of prudishness, close-mindedness, or conservatism. It’s just a different choice. I don’t question your choice; why do you question mine?
In my case, it’s a choice I made out of respect for my own body and out of respect for the person I eventually choose to marry. I’m still young enough to be a romantic at heart: I want my future husband to know that I loved him before I knew him, enough to save at least that for him and for us. I don’t know why others make the choices they do, whatever choices they make, but I respect them regardless. As expressions of sexuality become more openly accepted (and it’s high time they were!), the choice to refrain from such expressions needs to be equally accepted.
I plan to talk to my children about the importance of good, healthy, and safe choices, and about what those choices are, but I want to make sure that they understand that all the choices are equally valid. I can only hope that others will do the same.
–anonymous
Nigerians need to let go of that moral crap, sex is not bad; So why do Nigerians demonize it?
Your mother cannot even give you proper sex education as a yound adolescent, rather she says ‘ if you go close to a boy or if a boy should touch you , you’ll get pregnant’ .
BULLCRAP!!!!! Hey wonderful mother, why don’t you say ‘ my girl, if you have sex without protection with a young man you will get pregnant’ .
Isn’t that real and honest compared to making your child believe she’s some reincarnation of Virgin Mary that will concieve by some holy apparition.
Why don’t you tell your child, because believe me , she already knows the whole 9 yards, I dare say at age 12 she knows half of what you knew at age 23.
via Ttlolla’s Mind: Lets Talk Sex.
My sex talk came from my mom when I told her I was six months pregnant at the age of seventeen. “Why didn’t you tell us you were having sex? We could have put you on something.” Not coming home until five in the morning apparently wasn’t enough of a clue for her.
When I had my daughter a short three months later, I vowed not to be that type of parent. The type who knows her mother got pregnant and married at eighteen, whose grandmother did it at sixteen, and who herself was pregnant and left to have an abortion at eighteen. I was going to be open, discuss the family cycle that was present for us, and hope to give my child a different outlook on sex.
Sex is an open topic for us, and has been for the whole fourteen years of her life. She knows her unmarried mother has a sex life that she enjoys, and knows that her mother doesn’t expect her to remain a virgin until her wedding night. I have told my daughter that sex is beautiful and something to be enjoyed when you are capable of dealing with the consequences of your choices. I have also told my daughter she should never have sex because someone else wants her to or she thinks she needs to make someone else happy.
Sex should have a natural conclusion, and unless you are getting there as often as the guy you are doing it with, you shouldn’t be doing it. If he cared about you, he would want you to be happy as well. I know so many girls who have sex to keep their boyfriend happy or to fit in, but who never learn the joy of it until much later in life.
By talking about sex and not making it a taboo subject, I hope to break the family cycle in the next generation that I wasn’t capable of breaking for myself.
I am a single father of an eighteen-year-old daughter … or was. She graduated and moved on to the Navy. She has always seemed somewhat immature in the ways of the world, although later I came to understand that it was not immaturity that I saw but a silent maturity, not brash and sixteen talking 25.
She had a attraction for boys but never more than friends. We had recently moved here from Texas. Historically her boy friends were back in Texas so when she announced she had a boy friend the question was here or back in Texas. The answer was typically “back home.” I didn’t have to be too overly concerned about that. That lulled me in to a false sense that there would be time. I was always pretty proactive about sex talk … not being shy or prone to euphemistic side stepping.
Shortly after the first of the year she found a great boy friend HERE. I took the sort of comedic panicked dad approach and met him ad the door on their first date night with a hearty hand shake. “Come on in,” I said to him. “You are not going to be having sex with my daughter tonight are you?” His stunned silence swallowed the moment.
The way I came to understand that he was a great kid was his answer. He assured me that he was attracted to her but that he was college bound and that he didn’t want to mess up his scholarships and all. He has a real passion for his direction in life and it showed. He didn’t shy away from the topic at all. My daughter was mortified of course.
Time passed and they dated more.
Eventually the question came up from my daughter: “How will I know when it’s right?”
I said that the time and place will be right for your first time … deep breath … loonnnng pause … when you can stand in that place and time with authority and know that you are not doing any thing wrong. You will know that no one can punish you because you are not a child being caught with “your fingers in a cookie jar,” and when you are relaxed, as relaxed as can be, about the situation and the place. You know that complete authority is yours and are not ashamed in the situation.
I said that if your privacy were to be compromised you could stand tall and not be ashamed because this is your time and your place. I added that this situation should not be reached or pushed until you have talked with your partner about some future and you are as sure as you can be that he is not going to forget you tomorrow after you have given him something of yourself you can not get back. Your virginity is a gift that can only be given to one person … ever. It would be a tragedy if that person discarded you and your gift like a Christmas fruitcake.
I was feeling pretty good about that answer … so I went on but I think I goofed it. I shared with her some of her mother’s past and her experiences with youth molestation and how they affected her and her sexuality. I went in to some short bits about her high school days and the like. I explained that when her mother and I were working towards having a child I had wanted a daughter so that we could raise a girl who was strong and confident in herself and her sexuality, not pre-weighted with hang-ups and unwanted baggage that would take years of self reflection and therapy to undo.
I tend to ramble and at some point I noticed her eyes had glazed over and dilated and was becoming unresponsive. It had gone from a conversation to a lecture. I realized that in the future answers to questions like this should be spaced out over several conversations so as to avoid overload. Unfortunately for me I had run out of time. Graduation was upon us and then she was gone.
Don’t let that happen to you.
You know how Cosmo has a different article about sex on the front cover every month? How it’s really the *same* article, over and over again, just with a few different paragraphs here and there? What about those racy “It Happened To Me” stories in the middle of YM magazine? “I had sex with my stepfather,” or “My mom was a prostitute”, etc. Those ridiculous articles were my earliest introduction to a sexual lifestyle.
I devoured them, article after article, issue after issue, in a big, quiet library a few towns over. My mother was part of a quilting group that met at this particular library on Wednesday nights and sometimes Saturdays. She’d bring me along so I could do my favorite thing – read. She was sort of in the dark about exactly what I was reading, of course. I would flip the magazines over to the back and stack them so the least salacious advertisement was on the top of the stack.
Sex was driven out of my parents’ house. I knew they were having it, they knew I knew they were having it, and they put me on the pill before I started having it. Needless to say, no one wanted to talk about it. When I got my period, I waited a day and a half to tell my mother, convinced she was going to explain in detail how tampons were inserted. If something sexual happened to flit across the TV screen, my mother would change the channel after a few agonizing seconds. Sooner or later I figured out that if I simply left the room, I could listen from the dining room and figure out when it was safe to come back in. I can’t even tell you how much television was ruined for me by Viagra commercials.
I know this is supposed to be a story about what my parents told me about sex, but that would be a very short story indeed. The only way to tell my story is to talk about the person who *really* taught me about sex.
When I was fifteen I met the guy who would save me from night after night of awkward television watching with my parents. My first boyfriend was a freak, a loner. He wasn’t exactly who I always thought I was going to lose my virginity to, but it was obvious that there was a story waiting to be told between us. People I barely knew laughed at me, said I could do better than Dave. They didn’t understand him and they certainly didn’t understand me. I knew I would do things for him that I wouldn’t do for anyone else. I lost my virginity to him a year later.
We spent every day together and had sex nearly every day. I realize now how lucky I was to have such a passionate boyfriend who wanted nothing more than to please me. One day my father opened the door to my room to find me lying on the bed with Dave’s head between my legs. He immediately closed the door and stood out in the hallway. “You don’t have to come out, I just want to know what kind of pizza you wanted me to order for dinner,” he yelled through the door. It still makes me cringe thinking about it. My poor father.
The sexual energy that brought us together was the only thing keeping us together after a while. He was a member of my family and I couldn’t imagine losing him, but Dave wasn’t easy to love. He contracted Lyme disease and refused to get treated for it, saying medicine was unnatural and he would heal himself. He started walking with a limp, then started using a cane, before he would admit his ‘treatment’ wasn’t working. He was a person of extremes and his opinion was the only right one. Being his girlfriend was a full time job. I was incapable of leaving him alone. A three week family vacation to Germany, where a phone call to Dave was more expensive than most of the souvenirs I bought, was an unbelievably stressful experience. I didn’t want to be surprised by something that had happened to him in my absence. Not only was Dave a handful on his own, but his father had been known to throw knives at him, among other things. He made me come, but he made me cry too. Years later he told me that he had both a personality disorder and bipolar disorder, and I thought, NOW it all makes sense!
I was single when I went to college and it was the right thing to do. I don’t regret what I did in high school and I am learning to look back on my past with laughter rather than embarrassment. Even when my parents found my stash of condoms and a vibrator in my old bedroom.
My mom tells me this story about the extent of the sex education she received from her mother. The story is short.
It goes, “On my wedding day, my mother gave me this advice: ‘Tonight, he’s going to want to do something. Let him.’”
My parents divorced when I was a young child and moved far away from each other. I lived with my mother who, in addition to being a single mom, turned to Christianity for comfort after the divorce. Growing up, not only was no one having sex in my house, no one was talking about it either. Even though I never remember my mother saying anything to me specifically about sex, I just knew I wasn’t supposed to be having it.
We visited my father a few times a year and because of my resentment and his distance, our relationship was strained for much of my childhood. However, he tells me that at one point he and my step-mom gave me a copy of Where Did I Come From? (I was around seven). Apparently after I finished reading it, I asked if I could read it again the next night because I liked it so much. Although I don’t remember this specific incident, I do remember finding that book and re-reading it almost every time we visited. They also owned The Joy of Sex, which they clearly left out where it would be easily accessible.
When I was in college, I told my dad that I was sexually active (I was asking to have a boy stay at his place). He had a momentary freak out and then immediately went into contraceptive counseling mode. Once he ascertained that I was using protection he said “Well…that’s fine then. We won’t walk around in our bathrobes if you won’t.” And that was that and has been ever since.
My mother, on the other hand, kept up her abstinence-only policy. When a boyfriend was going to visit over Christmas break she told me the only thing I ever remember her telling me about sex. Ever. She said “He can stay here but you have to sleep in separate rooms because I don’t want your little sister thinking that I condone that sort of thing.”
“That sort of thing.” My mother’s only acknowledgment in the 27 years of my life that I am a sexual being. Sadly, the little sister mentioned above bore the brunt of my mom’s obvious knowledge of my behavior and her guilt at not preventing it. She received lectures, incredibly restrictive curfews and an abstinence ring, handed to her one family Christmas partially for her and partially as a passive aggressive reproach to me. My sister lost her virginity her first weekend at college.
I work now at a feminist sex toy store, spending my days writing and talking about sex. I suppose my mom wouldn’t condone “that sort of thing” either, but she doesn’t know about it. I don’t talk about it.
I’m just following her example.
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.
“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.
My seventeen year old had her first sex with a male while she was camping. No, I am not going to tell her story, as it’s not mine to tell.
But I am going to give a few reasons why talking about sex with your kids is necessary and important. And I am going to pat myself on the back again for being a good mom.
Reason #1: She has been on birth control for a few years. Her choice. Because she talked to me about a boyfriend she had at the time, and if she wanted to go that far, she wanted the option to say yes. And she asked to be put on birth control, just in case. So we talked about birth control options and she chose what she thought would be best for her. It has worked so far.
Reason #2: She was able to have sex with someone she considers a friend (what I think of him doesn’t matter). And with someone who was able to make it memorable – even if it wasn’t all she thought it was going to be. And she was able to do this without fear from her parents. And she was able to tell her parents about her decision without fear about what they would think or do. And she was able to talk about what was good and bad and what she can/will do to make it better next time – whenever that happens.
Reason #3: She insisted on using a condom – every time she had sex while camping (three nights). Her chosen partner tried to convince her that they didn’t have to – for reasons I will not go into here – it is her story. She insisted on the condom. She didn’t want to take the chance of getting pregnant and ruining her plans for her immediate future. He complied and everything continued to be fine.
I have to admit, I was worried about how she would handle this camping trip. It was full of firsts for her – she has never camped before, never had s’mores before, and never had penis-in-vagina sex before. I wasn’t sure she would even think about the convos we had had about the importance of protection. She doesn’t always think ahead, you know.
If I hadn’t insisted she listen every time I talked about sex, would she have been this responsible? If I hadn’t been so open about sex and birth control and STD’s, would she have insisted a condom be used? Would she have thought it through and chose someone who she was absolutely comfortable with? Would she have made sure she was in a safe environment?
I don’t know. But I’m so glad I have the conversations I do with my children. This is just one more thing that proves I am doing the right thing by talking to them. By answering every single question they have.
Talk to your kids. It’s important. They really listen, even when they act like they don’t want to hear what you are saying.
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