My mother pretty much tackled everything as far as parenting in my teenage years was concerned but there was one nut she couldn’t see fit to crack (excuse the pun soon revealed).
That was the ‘sex talk’.
The sex talk is famous in parenting lore as an exercise in discomfort and probably every tact has been taken and few of them effective but, hey, this one’s a toughie so you have to have sympathy for the lecturer.
My mother decided to turn the duties over to my dad (father #2) and set it up so when I’d go over to his house (4 years divorced from our house) to visit he would impart his vast knowledge of the forbidden fruits and I’d have what I needed to carry me through the rest of my life. I wasn’t aware of this plan when I went over there.
I can’t imagine how my dad said yes to this, knowing his reluctance for anything substantive in the parenting department, but there he was getting ready to make his major speech on the reproductive act and all of its ramifications and I never even saw it coming.
The night started normally enough with the opening of the first Stroh’s beer can (sort of like the lighting of the Olympic torch – “Let the games begin!”) and the subsequent supportive openings of the many more beer cans (the athletes enter the stadium). Nothing out of the ordinary here, just the natural progression of my dad’s ritual. As his intellect turned to mush I sensed a level of urgency and social stutter that wasn’t usually there when he was getting hammered.
Anyhow, I’m sitting at his kitchen table when out of the blue and I mean with absolutely no warning whatsoever he blurts out with almost crazy intensity: “Do you jack off?”
‘Jack off’, of course, was the crude slang for masturbation that was in vogue at that time in the ’60’s.
Well, by now I was 13 and had a full year or more of hormone development under my belt and definitely knew what he was referring to so I started to giggle. I never replied yes or no, I just giggled, which left him even more insecure than when he popped the first beer can. He repeated the same sloppy question like I’d lost my hearing: “Do you jack off?”
I giggled some more and squirmed in my chair because the question was just as poorly delivered as the first time and just as humorously so I was stunned and unresponsive. I wasn’t deaf, just mortified, thank you.
My quasi-silence was killing him so he followed that up with, “Well, if you do, it’s O.K. I’ve done that once in a while myself”. And that was it, show’s over, thanks for coming…good night! That was ‘the talk’ and it was over in a blink with few casualties and no real benefit.
Now, don’t get me wrong, emotionally I was relieved we were moving on to other subject matter but, intellectually, that’s it? No ‘fill in the blanks’ for your boy? No detail? No warnings?
I don’t think my friend Dan got any better results; his dad acknowledging his son’s burgeoning sexual awareness and then demanding that Dan “keep his penis in his pants!”
Can you imagine? What if Dan had taken that literally? An entire life with your penis in your pants. Why, the guy would be afraid to use the public restroom for fear he’d hurt somebody and, yet, we both survived this blot on good parenting skills and now have nifty stories to tell.
Poor dad. Parenting was never one of his talents and I never mentioned the results of the evening to my mother so she never found out how badly he bungled the deal. For all she knew he could have recited the Kinsey Report with annotation.
I’m not sure who taught me more about sex, my friend Bobby down the block or my own curiosity but I’m pretty sure that either of these were contenders for the crown with my dad’s extensive encyclopedia of erotic education coming in a distant last. Apparently, I’d have to struggle on a while longer as a sexual moron.
