My eldest daughter just turned 8. We have had the "where do babies" come from talk. The daddy puts a seed in the mommies belly yadayadayada. Lately though she is asking more and more difficult questions, like how do some people have babies before they are married, while others do not. I do my best to be honest with her while still keeping the conversation age appropriate. I hope to do right by her, and prepare her well for the big scary world out there.
I think back to my own "talk" with my parents. As I started to show signs of puberty, my parents asked me if I knew the low down. I had read plenty of Judy Blume, and had a general idea. I answered in metaphors and my father, a scientist, told me I had no clue what I was talking about. Looking back, it may have been overly poetic, but I was at least sort of right. I was handed a copy of "Our Bodies Ourselves" and sent on my way.
While I did have a general sense of the biology behind the female cycle, there was so much that I did not feel prepared for. The Sex Ed both at home and at my Catholic school were all about "DO NOT". There was no help for dealing with the finer subtleties of social interactions with the opposite sex. Like so many women, I had to rely on my peers for advice, not that they were any more knowledgable than myself. I was a source of information for my younger sisters, and I hope they found themselves slightly better prepared for the world than I was.
One thing about my coming of age in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, there was a lot of information about condoms all over the place. "No glove, no love" commercials abounded, and there were many PSAs like this one with Johnny Depp. When I was in 5th grade, the word condemn was a vocabulary word one week. Each week our teacher would have us pronounce the word and venture a guess at a definition. When we got to condemn, the class fell silent. We were all thinking the exact same thing. The teacher was stunned by our silence. She prodded for a few minutes. Surely someone must know this word. Finally, knowing I was a voracious reader and may have an idea, she called on me. I meekly said "condom". Thankfully she burst out laughing so I did not have to proffer a definition for the word. Nearly in tears, she said, "No, they wouldn't put that on a 5th grade vocab list." Honestly though, I think we all could have benefitted from an explanation of what one was, just as we should have been instructed as to the correct spelling of the word condom.
I remember being asked by some older girls if I was a "virgin" when I was about 12. I had no concept of what the term actually meant beyond reference to the Virgin Mother and perhaps the Madonna song. Of course I was one, but I didn't really know what the question meant. I had not even kissed a boy at that point, but given the paradox that Mary can be a virgin and somehow end up pregnant, what sense is the word supposed to make to a kid?
Fast forward 2 or so years to high school. After years in a nice little Catholic School environment, I was thrust into a large, inner-city public high school. The first week of school, an upper classman pinned me against a locker and said to me perhaps the dirtiest thing I have ever heard, even to this day. I had no idea what to do or what to say. This for sure would now be labeled sexual harassment, but back then, I'm not so sure that even if I had said something to someone that anything would have been done. Several male teachers and even the Vice Principal at the time were known for placing advances on young pretty girls.
I eventually found my way, though it took some trial end error, and a failed first marriage to figure it all out. I'm hoping my daughters have an easier time of it. I do hope to arm them with more knowledge than I had, and maybe even some vocabulary words. Otherwise they may turn to their friends, or worse, to the interwebs for answers. God only knows what will come up if they search for certain keywords.
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