Antonya Nelson
Let’s Talk About Sex
I swore that when it came time, I would level with my kids about the birds and the bees. Easier said than done.
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“Lalalalalalalalala!” exclaimed our daughter adamantly, the older sister, plugging her ears and dashing out of the room. Patiently, my husband and I explained, in that saccharine birds-and-bees voice that everyone knows so well. When a mommy loves a daddy very much . . . (When a cow loves a bull . . .)
Our son took in this new information, sighed, duly notified, then yelled to his sister, “You can come back now.”
“Sponge-worthy” showed up on a subsequent Seinfeld episode; similar questions arose, similar explanations were given.
Eventually, the conversation had to take a different tone. When my daughter began to go through puberty, she came to me concerned about the changes in her body. It was an anxiety I remembered from my own adolescence. I had confided in no one, stolen my first bra from my best friend rather than confess I needed one to my mother. So I tried to get my daughter to take a different tack. “Of course your body’s going to change,” I said, utterly no-nonsense. Did she really want to be the first female who didn’t grow breasts? Underarm hair? That would be the freakish thing, not changing. Friends were having menstruation parties for their daughters; Kansan that I am, I found that a little too California-crunchy-granola for us. Instead, I taught my daughter how to shave her legs (I still have a scar from my own do-it-yourself, trial-by-fire days) and how to use hydrogen peroxide to remove blood stains. We discussed STDs. At school one of her teachers demonstrated rolling a rubber over a banana (when I was a kid, we’d done this in a friend’s basement, and we’d used a cucumber, which probably led to a few disappointments later on).
When it was my son’s turn, we went to Target and did some shopping. Into the cart went a variety of supplies: dandruff shampoo, deodorant (did he really want to be the boy with BO in his class?), razors, and a giant box of condoms. At checkout, as he pulled these and all manner of other products from our cart onto the conveyor belt, he observed that we were going to be ready for anything. The woman at the cash register gave us a dubious glance.
(Sometimes I check in on the box of condoms, stored in my son’s bathroom medicine cabinet. They are disappearing, but then his high school mascot is a Trojan, and at football games the students toss the foil-wrapped packets at the opposition.)
The woman at the cash register might have been right—you can’t really be ready for every single anything, no matter how well stocked your cupboard, no matter how good your intentions, how astute your memory, how vivid your imagination. You can cite information about hormones and eggs and spermatozoa and pheromones and even bring in the animals—those penguins and cranes and wolves and monkeys, all gaga with instinct and some touchingly anthropomorphized traits, like monogamy or compassion or fidelity—but nothing can explain the insanity of lust and attraction and passion, the random firing of the brain’s pleasure center.
And what about love? As a teacher of creative writing, I’ve had to instruct students for more than twenty years how not to use words to describe the object of love—not to note the auburn tresses or spectacular pectorals, the Windex-blue eyes or the Jell-O-like breasts—but rather to focus on the unnameable, the ineffable, the incredible sensation of dignified love, that strange enchantment two people concoct in contact with each other. Spiritually. Bodily. Fantastically. This force is naked to the human eye, I tell them; its parts do not add up to its sum. It’s a condition, an illness, the vapors, cancer. “What’s wrong with her?” “She’s in love.” Enough said.
But the hardest word to define, even (especially?) to ourselves, may be the one we toss blithely, helplessly around all the time: desire. And not just hard to define, but impossible to regulate. All over the place, adults are trying, using a word like “abstinence” as arsenal. But what is abstinence when pitted against an incendiary glance? You can teach the head; you’ll never teach the heart. There are far too many examples of grown-ups who prove this lesson; we read about their peccadilloes every day in the newspaper. So what makes us think our kids are going to be any better at reining themselves in than we, their elders, are? My son’s girlfriend’s mother dropped by to meet me one day; she wanted to be sure there was an adult in the house. I think my son’s facial hair scares her. We shook hands, I promised her my son’s intentions were honorable. He later thanked me for not mentioning the little trip he and I had taken to Victoria’s Secret to get his girl a birthday gift. I had discouraged the racier version of a camisole he’d first selected, the transparent one with slits everywhere, in favor of the more decorous floral model. Still, we couldn’t avoid also acquiring a thong, as one came with every set. At checkout, he picked up a bottle of pink, cherry-flavored massage oil from the impulse-buy rack. “Better than coconut,” I agreed.
The other mother-son duo in the place was a six-year-old with his face buried in his mother’s skirt. “Can we go?” he was pleading, exposed to all the stuff he so didn’t want to know about. Yet.
One day it’ll hit that kid like a bolt from the blue, as if somebody had flipped a switch or cast a spell, voodooed him. He’ll be turned on, tuned in, raring to go. Concerning desire, that twinkle in the eye, that sudden racing heartbeat and chill up the spine, the insomnia and misery of wanting and needing the other, that certain alluring someone who becomes the center of your spinning universe, you might as well simply shrug in defeat, confess to your children, “I don’t know. It’s magic.” They do, after all, understand that.
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