The Birds And The Bees

No one ever had the sex talk with me.

My mother once asked, while I was locked in the car (her preferred means of trapping me for uncomfortable conversations), clearly embarrassed herself, “Do you have any questions about sex?”

I, equally embarrassed and after a long pause, said, “Yes.”

“Do you have specific questions?”

I shook my head “no.” I was not prepared for this, although I did have a bad feeling when the lock dropped on the passenger seat door for our impromptu “fun trip to the mall.”

“Do you think you’d like a book or something?”

I nodded.

A few days later, my mom slid a large picture book under my bedroom door. (I was 11 at the time and hadn’t read a picture book since about the age of 5.)

Of course, I immediately dove into the picture book. I had had questions about sex for years (or two, whatever). When we went to my grandmother’s house, I used to grab the “S” World Book encyclopedia for her shelf and look up “sex” when I thought no one was looking. (I always kept a hand on another page like “Syria” or “sulfur” just in case someone would come downstairs and wonder what I was researching.) Unfortunately, the 1963 World Book only covered sex as a topic having to do with plant reproduction, so that was a quick dead end.

When I was six or so, a friend of mine told me what sex was as she’d learned from her older sister, but I had a hard time with her definition. In the end, she was right, but it sounded awfully made up at that point.

What I remember from the picture book were drawings of an overweight couple and mention of loving one another a whole lot, nudity and friction. It might be because I was a very shallow child, but the really overweight cartoons were an immediate turn-off. (I now think it was an excuse to keep from making the figures anatomically-correct. Those bellies covered a lot.) These people just disturbed me, and I was glad they had found one another, but I did not want to read about their expressions of physical love.

That book was the last mention of sex my mom made to me for another eight years.

We clearly had sex education in school, but our first sex ed program was a little extreme, and I think it scarred most of us for life.

At the beginning of the day, a woman stood before us with a pink paper heart. “There once was a girl named Jane. Jane met a boy that she liked. She thought she loved him. Jane decided to have sex with this boy – before they were married. Then the boy dumped Jane, and she lost a little bit of her heart …” At this point, a corner of the paper heart was torn off.

“Then Jane meets another boy, and she thinks that she loves him too …” she went on. Before long the entire heart lay shredded before us.

“By the time Jane wants to get married, she has no heart left to give.”

There was a later story along similar lines about a girl who decided to wear the special pearls her parents were going to give her on her wedding day before their special time. She snuck in to her parent’s room and stole the pearls to wear when she went out (which is what everyone does with pearls); so that by the time she received the pearls on her wedding day, they were brown and dirty. In short – damaged goods.

The latter story bothered me only because I knew from my mom that pearls needed to be worn to keep their shine. Something about the oils in your skin being good for the jewelry. I got where the woman was going with her story. I just thought she should have chosen a more accurate metaphor.

The day ended with abstinence pledges that were “our choice” to sign, but everyone from the program stood over our shoulders for extended periods of time while handing them out.

After the disastrous paper heart incident and poorly-chosen allegories, the school stuck to puberty and “our changing bodies.” When I changed schools, sex ed was led by someone who looked like the picture-perfect grandma, and after she said “fellatio” more than once with her lovely, I-made-you-cookies-dear smile, I think we were all traumatized in a different way. (If trauma was meant to counter raging teenage hormones, I suppose it was borderline successful.)

Cosmo was my new textbook, for better or worse.

It wasn’t until years later, when I was already in college that my father referenced the sex talk my mom and I had had when I was younger. My mother, my father and I were in the car on the way back from dinner.

“Sex talk? What sex talk?” I said.

“Your mother and I talked about it, and she agreed that she would be the one to give you and your sisters the sex talk. Surely, you remember that?” my dad said.

“There was no sex talk,” I said.

This is when my mother finally 'fessed up. “I couldn’t go through with it,” she said. “It was just too hard. I couldn’t do it.”

“Laurel’s mother!” (I don’t like to use real names.) 

“You try it,” she said. “It’s not easy.”

“Clearly,” my father said, “but I think it’s a little too late for me to give it a shot.”

“You promised,” my father said.

“Well,” my mother said, "like you said, it's a little late."

 Finally, the missing piece of my adolescence made sense. “So,” my father said after a few minutes, “where did you learn about sex?”

 And that’s when I gave him the answer every parent wants to hear, “On the street, of course.”