"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.