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"Having Sexy"

I don't think I need to tell you my dilemma. The title should be telling enough. My son has only just finished Pre-K and I am having to deal with "sexy." As the little girl in the opening of Annie Hall tells the Woody Allen character, "Even Freud said there was a latency period."

My son had his "girlfriend" over (that's another story). We were watching TV when suddenly: Are they having SEXY?

This after almost 20 minutes of surfing the channel guide for something age appropriate for my son and his friend to watch.

The Cats! It was the cats! We have two. A male and a female. The male has been particularly randy these last few weeks. They male mounted the female right in plain view just a foot or two from where we were sitting.

I don't know how much faith I would put in the people who created Spongebob to inform me about sex and my kindergartner but what I read on their site seemed to make common sense.

The Parent Center at the Baby Center site has a more authoritative name and provided much more information. In fact the Parent Center has a "How to Talk" for almost everything under the sun.

Most of the sites say the same thing. Speak calmly and openly. Don't make stuff up. Don't rush to judgement. And admit when you don't know stuff. Of course, despite my training as an educator and my liberal social views, I became the perfect caricature of the uptight old Christian school marm - Look Away Children! Look Awayyyy!

Blame it on conditioning? The insistence on silence and avoidance by a sexually repressed society? Contrary to my education and my liberal views, when it came speaking to my son about sex, I am a hypocrite. Caught off guard by the situation, my instinct was to avoid the issue and ignore it (which is what I did). I shooed the cats away and ask my son and his "girlfriend" to continue to watch TV. They did but I suspect that the question had not been forgotten.

I tried to follow up with my son the next day but it was too little, too late, and it was more of a talk about coming to his mother and me with questions about the body and what the cats were doing. I spoke to him about not touching other people's bodies and about how "No means No." But we just never got around to talking about sex. In fact, I don't think the word ever came up.

Writing Assignment

Last fall, I took a children's book writing class. The first assignment was to write a letter to yourself at a younger age. I just came across my letter to my 12-year old self:

Dear Vincent,

You don’t have to read the whole thing if you don’t want to. You don’t have to read this all at once. I’m hoping you do but you don’t have to.

This is going to sound weird but sometimes it is OK to lie. Just like people, there are “good lies” and “bad lies.” A “good lie” would be when someone gives you a present and you really wanted something else, but you say you like it anyway because you don’t want to hurt their feelings. A “bad lie” is when you say you have something you don’t because you think it is going to make you more friends.

Don’t try to impress people. Your friends are your friends because they like you, not the things you have or who you want them to think you are. That’s the other thing. You’re not a bad person, so I don’t understand why you need to be someone else. Don’t. You are going to hurt more people than you can live with because you weren’t honest.

Try this: Get yourself a marble notebook, the kind that Mommy buys every August to get you ready for school. Then get yourself a pen or pencil, something you like to write with. Always keep the two together. Always keep the two hidden in a spot that only you can remember. Write down the bad lies you want to tell in the notebook instead of telling them to people. It’s like making up stories just like the stories you read or watch on TV. Use the notebook for your thoughts, dreams, and the things that scare you. It might feel strange and be hard at first, but I think you’re really going to get to like it.

You’re 12 now. Twenty plus – almost 30 – years from now I don’t want to be sitting here writing this letter.