The Birds and the Bees Talk. A new era of dialogue.

Sometimes I am just blown away by the speed with which my children are growing and learning.  Every other week when they return to me they are taller, taller, taller!  At some point last week, my middle child somehow grew to within an inch of the top of her older sister's head whereas only the week before she had been about 6 inches shorter - causing, of course, my oldest to protest to everyone who sees this that she is going to be the "Aunt K" of the family - read "el shrimpo"  (heh heh, that's for you Ka...Love you!)

This is all well and good and natural - if you feed children and actually get them to bed at a reasonable hour they will grow.  Also a little known factoid?  If you send them to school and demand they learn something, they will.  Whodathunkit right?

In addition to all this growing and stretching and learning, they are dissecting every facet of their little worlds: the academics, the social, the spiritual, the sexual.  (Insert record scratch here.  Yeah, wait, hold up DJ.)  And while I have one more year before my oldest hits the teeny bopper age for the first time, she is already acutely aware of sexuality and how it is now affecting the boys and girls of her class, her friends, and her parents.  I add (less obviously) "parents" here because while most kids experiences of witnessing sexuality in their parents stems from an intact relationship, her exposure to this aspect of sexuality has to be viewed now in terms of who her parents date and how they handle those relationships - a fact which I believe impacts my kids more particularly then their friends who's parents who are still married.  (More on this some other time.)

Yesterday I was suckered   coerced    manipulated  plied with booze by my child asked by my oldest to ruminate with her about some of the traditional talking points of the birds and the bees lesson.  I honestly had not anticipated having to have this full on discussion with her until sometime next year (I have no earthly clue why I believed 13 was the age of sexual reason, but there you have it).  But as luck would have it, I have been reading a book called "Your Daughter's Bedroom" by Joyce McFadden. 

(Courtesy of Amazon images.)

Ok, I'm not even half way through this book yet but what I have read thus far suggests more than very strongly that we should be honest, comfortable, confident and factual when having this dialogue with our daughters about s.e.x. and their bodies.  I have always believed I would be all these things and more with my kids when it came to this discussion, but last night I really did it correctly....I think I actually nailed it! A+ for Mom!

I did field the "did you have premarital sex", "what is heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism" and "how do you know if you are or not one?" questions.  "How do men and women have sex; how do men and men have sex, how do women with women have sex"?  Sex, sex, sex, blah, blah, blah - we talked about everything.  And because Catholicism has it's own theology and cannons for all these subjects too, we discussed that bullshit those religious implications as well.  And then I had to make dinner before the other two kids not privy to the conversation and wondering where we were cratered from starvation and all hell broke loose. 

Of course this anecdotally draws me back to what my birds and the bees discussion with my own mother resembled.  See below:

(Image courtesy of LAUNCH9650) 

Well, not that bad unless you consider saying to your daughter that sex is '"something" that happens only between a man and a woman who are married"...That, "when girls have sex outside of marriage they always become pregnant".  And that "if YOU have sex before you get married and get pregnant then I will not let you live here anymore. You will be on your own."

I know what you're thinking here.  My mom, she was just so, so.....  Informative. Factual. Non-threatening. Non-judgmental.  Warm. Inviting.  Mom totally had it going on, right?

I will add the caveat here that no matter how many times I've repeated to my mom that that is actually a precise rendition of what she said to me when I was 14 years old, she will deny, deny, deny ever having said this.   Story of my life.  Honestly, this was the extent of our "birds and the bees" discussion. 

The rest of the B&B facts of life stuff I picked up here and there from my best friends in school; tv; movies; conversations overheard (and equally misinterpreted - dear God did I get some things way wrong like taking the  term "blow" too literal).  Together my friends and I piece mealed a collage of misinformation, some facts, rumor and exploits that served to guide us all the way up to womanhood until we learned all too quickly that ....we got it all way wrong.  And then, angry that we had been so deliberately misinformed by people who claimed to love and care for us unconditionally, we just all went ape shit in college.  How do you like us now Catholic moms, huh? Huh?

The point here is that every human, in addition to being spiritual, academic, intellectual, physical, is also highly sexual.  Growing up, Catholic dogma and generational frigidity permitted our parents and guardians to forcibly stifle any recognition of this aspect of our being...our sexuality, let alone promote some sort of conversation about it in some meaningful way. 

I am happy to report that I have placed this conversation with my children, particularly with my daughters (one child down, 2 to go!) on such a completely different track that it is bound to have a more profound impact on her understanding of herself and her sexuality than I was ever given.  I hope so.  I pray she will be a better woman, a more confident woman than I ever was at her age.  Fingers crossed there.