Let’s talk about sex….

wordswithmrsh - 8 Nov 16

It was Friday night. Time was ticking ever closer to wine o’clock with the husband and there were no alarms set for the morning. However, in the chilling out for the weekend process, our just-turned 9 year old was winding up and doing that showing off thing kids do – when he casually starts talking about sex. And in a context that he might actually know something about it. Crap.

The husband and I review our options. Option One – pretend we didn’t hear it and move on with our lives. That was obviously the preference. Option Two – suss out what the boy thinks he knows. Option Three – have THE CHAT.

I have to confess I have no idea what age other children find out about sex, I guess it’s a personal preference what we as parents want our kids to know and when. However, our first born has simply never asked or said anything about sex before so we didn’t feel the need to bring it up. He’s seen me pregnant twice but only ever asked about how the babies were getting out. Which we told him.

We agreed we should find out what he thinks he knows. We have always felt we’d rather our kids hear the big topics from us. However, we may review this decision after how the rest of evening panned out….

Our boy was somewhere along the line of thinking of sex as being naked cuddles but had lots of questions about why people would cuddle naked, who are these people who cuddle naked and why it’s different from just being naked. As we start trying to explain the answers, I shoot the husband a look and the alarm in my head starts sounding – we are moving to option three, I repeat we are moving to option three – we are going to have to have THE CHAT.

We were not prepared but then I had a moment of hope. I have a book! I had bought it some time ago, waiting for the very day we had THE CHAT to help the discussion along. My moment of smug relief was short lived as I spent 10 minutes looking for said book, only to realise I had no idea where I have put it. Double crap.

I took a deep breath – It’s fine… I thought to myself, I have over 13 years experience in a profession that has required me to have very difficult, challenging and detailed conversations with children. So explaining sex to our son is going to be very straight forward….

As the husband and I start talking, in spite of spending the last nine years saying willy, we start saying penis and using only the correct medical terms for body parts. If it sounds official then we must be getting in right. Although, each time we said penis, our boy dissolved into tears of laughter and honestly we did too. Firstly, because even in your mid-30s sex and body parts are quite funny and also because his giggles bought us some time to think about what the bloody hell we would say next. Explaining body changes goes quite well, explaining sex is not as strong but we troop on.

There were moments when he covered his face with his hands and says ‘ewwww that’s gross’. I feel a wave of relief – that he seems to understand what we’re trying to communicate through all the ‘ums’ and stuttering; but also because he is nine and he thinks it’s all gross, and was probably deeply regretting repeating something he didn’t really know about as it made his parents go weird. He asked a lot of questions. The husband responded to most of them by saying ‘good question’ then shooting me a look as if to say seriously where is he getting this stuff from or do we really need to answer that? I sat with a wide fixed smile on face, chip in here and there and wonder why we didn’t go for Option One.

So we fumbled our way through and by the end, I think he was clear enough. Needless to say I went straight for the wine bottle and straw as soon as I could. He’s asked a few questions since but I think we’ve handled them better, I’m not sure we could do any worse.

Reflecting on it…. explaining sex to our son for the first time was in some ways similar to actual first time sex. Clumsy, fumbled and awkward with some laughs and then some wine. The good news is, the first time is over (again) and the great news is there is quite the age gap between our first born and our other two. So by the time they start asking questions, we should have this in the bag and failing that, I hopefully will have tracked down that bloody book.

wordswithmrsh

Mum of fabulous children, wife to one very patient husband. My blogs are about anything that has popped into my head as it occurs to me. I have aspirations to write more, that are slowly turning into reality. A lover of the simple things in life - good friends, good food, good wine and of course family.

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