Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

A few months ago, my son attended a two-part lecture for dads and sons about puberty. A funny yet informative lecture allowing giggles and laughter to smooth over plain old-fashioned information that normalizes puberty and soaks into the boys’ psyches. By the mere fact of attending, each young boy has been surreptitiously exposed to an all-male learning environment, a room with nothing but boys and their dads (or father figures); by the end, they have already had their first sex talk with dad, and with a group of guys outside a locker room, without ever knowing they’d had the first sex talk.

 

By having an expert provide the information (a male physician specializing in adolescent medicine), it insures that the information that was slung about was accurate and unbiased, as opposed to hyperbole, stories, legends and unresolved issues of masculinity that most grown up dads and older boys inadvertently bring to the talk when they have it on their own. A perfect example of the power of the “foot in the door” technique (sales people who get one foot in the door have gotten you to agree to something small and once you agree to something small, you are more likely to agree to something more): having this one fact-based discussion with other boys and men sets up the odds they’ll have another one, with their dad or some other grown up male in their community, because Dad and all the other Dads were there for this one.

 

Brilliant.

 

Moms weren’t allowed in the audience for the first lecture. Apparently boys need female-free zones to talk about penises (which, I’m learning, are only called “penises” by girls, Moms and physicians). “Boys better call them dicks or johnsons or something else or they’ll learn pretty quickly that they’re pussies,” was advice a seasoned man gave a good friend of mine when he heard she’d talked to her 9 year old boy using the word “penis.” Although this point was not covered in the curriculum, I’ve committed it to memory and vow to teach my son when he can use the word penis (with me, with his medical doctor) and the other times when it’s gotta go by its real name.

 

Yet the group realizes that it would be helpful to expand the series, so that opposite sex parents could learn something about how to help their tweens through puberty. Dads of daughters is next week, and last night was the one for mothers of tween age boys. It was my turn to be in a room where the conversation was solely about boys and sex. About wet dreams (and what the moms are supposed to do with the sheets) and seemingly random erections. About boys’ anxiety about being normal – is their penis large enough? Will they always have to think about sex or can they return to playing Legos and video games and the stuff they actually like?

 

We talked about all things physical, with almost no attention to the relational world of women and girls. We learned how to talk to our sons, and how not to talk to them. Don’t ask them direct questions. Don’t ask them what they’re doing or not doing. Don’t require an answer. Don’t sit down face to face for long talks. Don’t begin the “Honey, we need to talk …” nightmare that will raise their blood pressure and anticipate a fight-or-flight protective reaction every time they hear these words for the rest of their lives.

 

Again, brilliant.

 

Basically, the subtext was that the inner feminine – that which we’ve used up until now to help nurture our boys and cajole them into telling us how they feel because that’s how they feel close to another person – will make teenage boys feel trapped and cornered. We’re to drop conversational openers like pennies into a fountain – just drop them, one at a time, so that the ping of the coin in the water just barely registers to our active and busy boy who really doesn’t want to talk about sexuality but desperately wants to know he’s normal. Drop a few extra coins in there about our experiences, not to proselytize, but to remind our kids that we were once girls, and that girls, just like boys, don’t have to have it all figured out. And if we do it right, if we do it as if it’s no big thing and we’re continually open to the one out of a zillion times they’ll actually answer us, and that the one time they do we will hear them without shutting them down or telling them they’re wrong, the boys will grant us credibility and they’ll come back, a zillionth of the time, to their trustworthy, reliable Mothers who have been there all along, doing laundry and driving carpool and bringing snacks to sports meets and endlessly restocking the fridge to support the 1800-2600 calories they need to support bone growth until they’re at their full height.

 

At the end of the lecture, the speaker opened it up for the ubiquitous question and answer period. Great questions, opening up ideas and more questions for the other moms. One was about how to deal with a son’s “truthiness” – a word I’d heard a few time before but not fully in my lexicon – and now I get it – the variations between truth and lying, stretching and withholding parts of a day, a story, an interaction – and how perhaps to guide sons to the appropriate amounts and times for such distortions of reality, and how to come back to the truth when it is appropriate. Another question was about oral sex in middle school, and the answer was unexpectedly bland. The lecturer thought the prevalence was highly exaggerated, mythologized really – then he went on to explain just what a rainbow party was to those of us dolts in the audience who didn’t know – and brought us back to the sanity of hoping son’s won’t engage in sexual encounters before their brain development is at full capacity (age 25) despite the fact that their reproductive capacity is on board by age 12 – but to then be somewhat realistic and focus on prevention tactics so that boys make it through this 9-year physical mismatch of brain/penis components and competency without an unwanted STD or pregnancy.

 

Brilliant yet again.

 

Just the idea of middle school sexual mythology not being the same as middle school sexuality was freeing, and it helped unlock in my brain the capacity to think and work an idea through to see if it’s even possible. For instance, a rainbow party must exist solely in the realm of male fantasy/buddy-bragging because no lipstick ever made could create this kind of victory badge.

 

The first result of all this open talk about my lecture last night was that my son told me some of the dick jokes that his group of friends tell at lunch. And about the sidewalk chalk drawings of enormous erections which the boys then sit atop. I’d have never thought to ask about that. My son isn’t a very skilled artist, so I told him he might forgo trying to learn how to draw human faces and hands, horses and dogs (the primary art domain of girls his age), and go ahead and practice drawing dicks. Big ones. Maybe even figure out how to build an enormous one in Minecraft. “Just ’cause you can’t draw faces doesn’t mean you’re destined to sit out the dick-drawing at lunchtime,” I told him, sitting in the car this morning, the place where we Moms were told to have all our 1-minute conversations with boys because that way we can talk briefly, with a known end-time to the talk, and never have to make eye contact.

 

Check. We’ve begun the 1-minute talks about sexuality and his body and puberty and he’s still thinking I’m OK to share these things with because he remembered one more penis joke from lunch yesterday and shared it with me. Perhaps I’m in. I will work ever-so-diligently to remain in. Perhaps all around town this morning, boys and their moms are having short, 1-minute conversations without eye contact about wet dreams and masturbation and dick jokes.

 

Yet there’s one household in town that might not be having this conversation. There was one woman in the audience who somehow managed to sit through an entire lecture about her son’s burgeoning sexual development and come up with a question having nothing to do with sexuality. Right after the question about boys receiving oral sex in middle school bathrooms, she raised her hand. “I have a question about a more realistic issue. How do we talk to our sons about global warming?”

 

Are you kidding me? We’ve been immersed in talk about how Moms can understand and then – get this – talk about – wet dreams and masturbation and blow jobs and prevention of STDs and unwanted pregnancies and how to normalize our sons’ very real, daily concern about whether his dick is the right size and whether he fits in with all the other boys and whether he will have what it takes to make it as a grown up man, and this woman wants to know how to talk to her son about global F’in warming? Which is somehow more “realistic” than her son’s upcoming hormonal surges?

 

Who’s gonna talk to her son about his dick? Because even if we end up fried like eggs on the sidewalk, gasping for water, unable to fish or farm or grow a single damned crop and we’re all gonna die as the last human generation on planet earth – boys (and girls, let’s be clear) will be bringing their fully formed bodies and in-process minds to one another in search of the something better. The more scary the environment, the more desperate the sex. So you, pale and tight-lipped eco-Mom, may be concerned about global warming and you may have stopped having sex long, long ago in some protest against joy in the household, but your boy has a dick and a teenage brain and if there’s a website with hot naked women protesting the deforestation of the planet and another with anti-global warming centerfolds writhing on Al Gore look-alikes, that’s where you’re gonna find your son.

 

I don’t know what this gal and her son were talking about this morning, but I hope she comes back down to the reality that no matter what happens – famine, war, climate changes, voter fraud, Boy Scouts renouncing gay men while we have our first openly gay NBA player (giving a legitimate reason for young boys to read Sports Illustrated other than it’s glorious, steamy swimsuit issue that has nothing to do with sports but is the softest soft-porn available at supermarkets everywhere) – boys and men are often far more interested in dick (or baseball) than politics, unless politics can be used to get you more of the things your dick likes. And global F’in warming just doesn’t make anyone hot and steamy in a good way. I hope this boy has a Dad or lots of dad-figures from the other lecture that he will be able to talk with about eco-porn and the the mix of pleasure and responsibility that await his upcoming  adolescent and young adult years, someone who didn’t lose the point of the evening, which was to celebrate our sons and the sexual men they will become.

 

Sex education for moms cannot be so threatening that we can’t make it through the whole evening without veering off course into our own insecurities. So what if I never mastered adolescent sexuality? Let alone young adult sexuality? So what if it took me longer than I care to tell to learn that sex and love aren’t the same things? So what if I just learned what a rainbow party is? I don’t have to know everything about sex, mine or my son’s. I just have to stay present through the awkwardness and not-knowing and join in the willingness to find out, the willingness to remember that above everything else, we are sexual creatures who are more than sexual creatures who yearn for healthy sexuality and who have no real idea what healthy sexuality means because we don’t create healthy sexuality within a person, we create it with others, by normalizing bodies, desire, longing, fears, insecurities and, yes, joy – and forming the first male-female relationship with our boys in which they can still be loved and appreciated and honored and celebrated without having to know anything. Just come around every now and a zillionth again, and tell me what’s on your mind, son. I’ll tell you a little bit about me, too.

 

Brilliant.