by Mary Rice

Created on: March 05, 2010   Last Updated: March 10, 2010

No parent wants to think about their child being sexually active. For whatever reasons we wear a form of blinders where we see our children at age 5 forever, cute, sweet and innocent. When those blinders are harshly removed it can be a shock, rather like turning on a bright light in a pitch dark room. At least that's how it felt to me.

My daughter and I have always talked openly about sex. She would often ask me questions about things she heard, or so I assumed, and I'd give honest answers. I never once imagined the true source of her questions. Why would I? When the mother of one of her friends called me and asked to come over though, alarm bells chimed softly in the back of my mind. In short, no I did not react well when I was told by the mother of her friend that she had been having sex. In fact it was days before I actually calmed down. There was a great deal of hurt on both of our parts I think. I blamed myself mostly. I felt like I'd failed as a parent to install some sort of common sense or something in my child. I'm not going to say exactly how old my daughter was at the time, but it was a while ago.

How did I come to terms with this though? We talked; after I'd calmed down of course; about what had happened, what her perception of it was, her reasoning on it and my perception. W talked abut the social implications, as we lived in a small town at the time. Slowly it began to dawn on her the full impact of what she'd done. I began to relax and accept the events. Done was done and no amount of yelling, crying or self-recrimination was going to change that. Reaching that place didn't happen over night and it wasn't easy to get to, but it has made a major difference in how my daughter and I communicate.

Today she is still sexually active, however with an interesting twist. Whether it was from past experiences or some other factor that I have yet to figure out, my daughter is bi-sexual. There is a whole other can of worms to write about, which I'm not going to open here, but it took a great deal of courage to come out and tell me. We still talk openly about questions that she asks and we've had many a frank discussion about what the real cost of getting pregnant at a young age is. She's babysat for a few people with infants and remembers the experiences clearly enough to not want to go there just yet.

We had a conversation that went something like this:

Me: Do you remember what it was like watching C-?

Her: Yeah...kinda scary.

Me: Why scary?

Her: Because

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>