Fishing for answers over dinner
To the couple dining at the next table, it would have sounded like a perfectly natural conversation about what to order: the fish, or the eggs? But the man and boy sitting beside them – my husband and our 5-year-old son Lucas – were discussing the facts of life.
It wasn’t my husband’s intention to order fish and chips with a side salad of sex education at the Piha Surf Club last weekend, but our eldest child is naturally curious and every question answered – every who, what, where, why and how – serves as an invitation to demand more information.
What to tell him? I Googled for guidance but searching ‘‘how to teach children the facts of life’’ threw up a hot mess of parental propaganda. The top 10 results ranged from fairly benign – on the Kiwi Families website, Mark Leishman advocates doing it ‘‘earlier than you think... before someone else gets in first’’ – to fundamentalist fearmongering.
From born-again.christian.info came this unholy drivel: ‘‘Children are not born with innocent hearts. They are born sinners to the core, children of the Devil, bound for death and destruction because of the sinful nature they inherited from our first parents, Adam and Eve. Mothers, please don’t ever lie to your kids. Let the godless deceive their kids.’’
As a gardening heathen, I take umbrage at that. I won’t be telling tales of forbidden fruit, not when our apple trees are laden with new seasonfruit. It’s hard enough to get my children to eat healthy food as it is.
A couple of years ago, Britain’s then Deputy Children’s Commissioner Sue Berelowitz proposed the introduction of sex education to children as young as 5 in an effort to stop the grooming of girls. Her efforts came to nought, of course, because nothing gets up the nose of a prudish parent quite like a bureaucrat, even a well-intentioned one, telling us when and what we can say to our children about sex.
And yet, when it comes to giving The Talk, most adults find it hard to tell it like it is. We talk about getting laid, getting lucky, getting down and dirty, going all the way – in the biblical sense – yet we can’t seem to say penis or vagina out loud without blushing.
My parents deferred to a book. They read us Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle – the adman who later spent A Year in Provence – which promised ‘‘the facts of life without any nonsense and with illustrations’’.
It’s the illustrations I remember: a rather Rubenesque mum and dad getting in the bath together, buck naked with scribbled shrubs of pubic hair. (‘‘Don’t worry if the pictures don’t look too much like your mother and father,’’ said the authors, reassuringly. ‘‘The important parts are the same on all of us.’’)
Where Did I Come From? was first published in 1973. Four decades on, it’s ranked at No 5 on Amazon’s bestsellers list for its category. I re-read it online this week, and laughed. Sex is described as ‘‘a special kind of wriggling’’ that, nine months later, results in ‘‘a special kind of stomach ache’’. (My high-school science teacher, Mrs Carter, was rather more honest when she compared labour pains to ‘‘pooing a watermelon’’.)
As the mother of boys, I’d figured I’d at least be spared the conversations about periods and PMT, but I was wrong. ‘‘Give Mummy some privacy,’’ I said to my 3-year-old, Lachie, the last time he barged into the bathroom to find me, knickers around my ankles, on the bog.
‘‘OK mum,’’ he said, fossicking through the bathroom cabinet. ‘‘What are you looking for?’’ I asked. ‘‘Here’s some privacy,’’ he said, handing me a box of tampons.
At 5, his older brother already knows what tampons are, and where you put them. He also understands that babies come from eggs. He’s watched dinosaur videos on YouTube and seen our broody hens hatch out chicks. He gets it. What he doesn’t get is his dad’s role in all of this.
‘‘Well,’’ I explained, ‘‘Dad’s testicles are filled with tiny fish.’’ (I didn’t want to confuse the situation by comparing sperm to tadpoles, as he’d seen them hatch into frogs in the kindergarten fish tank and, thanks to Disney, believes princesses who kiss amphibians end up living in fancy castles.)
That pescatarian clarification caused much concern the next time he fell off his bike. ‘‘I’ve hurt my fish,’’ he sobbed, clutching his groin.
Then came the clanger: ‘‘How do your fish get to the egg?’’ he asked his dad over dinner. ‘‘Does mum swallow them?’’ Not quite, son, not quite.
When it comes to giving The Talk, most adults find it hard to tell it like it is.