CHARLOTTE REID,

55

‘Perhaps my daughter’s not so different to me after all’

Rebecca told me recently she remembers feeling I believed in her totally as a little girl, that she could achieve anything. So at least I got that bit right. By the time we got to the teenage years, it was way more complicated. Those years felt like one long rebellion, lots of slamming doors and shouting. I knew there were boys on Rebecca’s radar – and later, her sister Lucy’s, but I didn’t know where to start.

I could count my sexual relationships on the fingers of one hand, having met my husband at 19, in our first year at university. Not unusual for my generation but still, what could I usefully pass on to a savvy teen? I do know mothers who did sex-ed with their own cringing teenagers, and gave warnings and advice. But I just didn’t have the confidence.

My own mother was equally guarded about discussing sex in a useful way. When I once plucked up the courage to ask her if she’d been a virgin when she got married, she replied “almost,” and gave me a mysterious smile, which I’ve always wondered about. On another occasion, she told me that on her wedding night, just as she and my father were about to “do the deed” he stopped for a moment and said, “How do you feel about having a baby?” She said she hadn’t really thought about it but, yes, that would be fine and my brother was born exactly nine months later.

I hope I’ve done better than that. I think I have. Maybe discussing our actual sex lives wasn’t on the agenda, but general body stuff has always been as much part of the conversation as childbirth, Brexit and the best way to make fresh tomato sauce. Many years later, I worked out that Rebecca [above], now 27, gleaned much of her information from Sex and the City, which she watched at the tender age of 13.

She was determined to be different to me, and find a way to make sex shocking during her teens and early twenties, but she met her now-husband when she was 22, and settled down, so perhaps our romantic history is not so different after all. I’ve never asked either of my daughters how many sexual partners they’ve had and they’ve never asked me. Which I’m quite glad about. I have visions of Andie Macdowell listing her sexual partners in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and I can’t compete with that.