You want to do a good job on sex education with your kid but you probably don’t really know how you’re going to go until you’re there in the moment giving your little talk. Like so many other things, I imagine doing it with grace and ease but instead may do it with halting, shallow breaths while blushing madly. It’s one thing to talk about sex with your friends or your partner (or the Internet as it turns out) but it’s another thing entirely to talk about sex with your child.
Relatively speaking my mother’s sex education for me was really pretty good; she talked about making babies with me in primary school and abortion with me in highschool, but she was a little heavy handed with the “sex is something special to be saved for someone you really, really love” stuff. It kind of freaked me out. I know where she was coming from and it was a place of good intentions but really, what does “save sex for when you really love someone” tell you about blow jobs in high school, and all the rest of a teenager’s reality? Also, my mother has some fairly strong stereotypes running through her narrative about girls always falling in love when they have sex (some evolutionary psychological theory – I hate evo-psych) and boys not being prone to this problem, and again I know what she was trying to save me from but in my experience it was the opposite and her advice was of no use. How to ditch a love-struck boy without looking like a bitch? I struggled, and I remember lecturing my family not to even acknowledge my ex-boyfriend with his big, sad eyes if they saw him on the street even though for the past six months I’d been insisting on including him at every family event. Sorry to you, boy, I was a bitch.
And though my mother wanted to appear comfortable with sex talk, she really wasn’t. That’s ok, I definitely see where she’s coming from now. I want to impart real knowledge about sex to my daughter as she grows up, knowledge that will help her deal with the realities of what she might come across in sex in adolescence; masturbation, the right to say no, sexually-transmitted diseases, date rape, sexual chemistry with the wrong person (reminds me of such a good Buzzcocks song), promiscuity, crazy names for sexual positions, bisexuality, boyfriend (or girlfriend) theft, the madonna-whore complex, falling out of love, filming yourselves and the permanence of the Internet, all sorts of predatory behaviour etc. (You just know she’s going to grow up to be a nun after all this). Some stuff everyone just has to learn for themselves but I want to give her some street smarts without inadvertently grossing her out with too much imagery of her parents having sex. While I have all these good intentions and high expectations of myself I worry that I will be like my mother, trying to be straight forward but betraying an awkward tension about the whole topic.
Last week I started to realise something, even as a toddler Lauca’s sex education has already begun – learning the names of and exploring her own genitals, and just in the last month a little bit of talk about where babies come from. Many mother friends around us are either pregnant or having second babies and an opportunity has arisen to talk about where babies come from – ie. those big tummies. When we’re talking about this I wonder if Lauca thinks I am making up fantastic stories for her benefit; yeah and a baby is inside that mother’s tummy right now, whatever Mummy and we like to pretend that I can make pancakes out of play-doh, so whatever rings your bell, Mummy-oh.
A close mother friend of mine is planning a home-birth for her second child and she’s bought a picture book to prepare her toddler daughter. Its a really lovely story book written from the point of view of a child, who, with his family is preparing for the birth of the fourth child at home. Lauca and I were reading it and so la di dah di dah and then we got to the page with the illustration of the mother leaning against the father while the baby’s head emerges from her vagina. The other children and the mid-wife crouched down excitedly to see the baby. Lauca’s eyes widened and she looked at that page for the longest time, coming back to it after we’d finished the story just to take in that incredible illustration further. “The baby comes out of the Mummy’s vagina” she murmured over and over again. Yep, I said. (I’ll get to you cesarian babies another time, two points of entry to the world are a little complicated for the moment).
I was so pleased, just like that, sex education is happening. I didn’t feel uncomfortable or artificial about it, I didn’t have to over-think the discussion, like everything else she is learning about, we’ve just taught it to her as it has come up.
Long may it be this simple.
Welcome With Love?, I assume? It really is a tremendously lovely book.
And I know exactly what you mean about the learn-as-you-go stuff. It’s really satisfying.
Yep, that’s the book. I’ll insert the book image into my post.
Well, my mom taught me that oral sex is gross, masturbation is sinful, and only freaky people use vibators.
You can’t do any worse for Lauca than that!
True radicalmama, true. Nice to have you back post-camping.
My friend’s parents apparently covered sex ed by saying “Um, you know about, um, all that don’t you?”. He said “Yes”, and scurried away before they were embarassed into saying any more. He’s gay, they wouldn’t have told him anything he needed to know anyway.
Of course, they also sent him to a Catholic school, where the brothers told his class that any same sex attraction they might feel was a phase, which they would grow out of. He didn’t. He repaid them by sleeping around and coming out to them at least five years after everyone else in the world knew.