Brad got a nice refresher from Ali, his six-year-old on his sex ed talk that we had so many years ago when he was eight the other day. She told him that he has no womb. She knows this because of a book she checked out of the library.
Brad and Julia apparently don’t feel the initial sex talk I had with him him went well enough so many years ago provided a decent enough pattern, so they’ve allowed Ali to do it for herself it would appear.
I really didn’t do a very good job. I actually used paper and pencil with him for some unbelievable reason. I have no defense. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.
Brad and I I were parked in my Volkswagen Beetle outside of Peruvian Park Elementary School for appropriate privacy, I remember, and I stammered and stuttered through the whole thing. At the last minute I remembered talking about the rabbits we’d been raising and I recall saying “Didn’t it ever occur to you knowing how baby rabbits were made?”
And he responded, “Yeah, but then I thought, ‘That couldn’t be.’” And our conversation was over.
Ben’s sex talk was even worse. I just kept talking to him waiting for some
response to come over his face. It never came. He stayed perfectly stoic. I asked him later about it, years later, and he tried to comfort me by saying he knew most of it anyway. I knew it was a lie, but I took comfort from it anyway.
It’s amazing more of our children are not in analysis from the way we raise them. We probably ought to just give them books and let them learn about the Facts of Life on their own anyway. Didn’t most of our parents do a pretty lousy job of it, either by omission or blundering through.
Friends had it all wrong, by-and-large, but at least they weren’t so traumatizing.
