Me when I was little: “mom, why are those guys holding hands?”
Mom: “well you know how you like girls? Some boys like boys. Some girls like girls.”
Me: “oh, cool. Mom, why are the street signs here blue but green in the other town?”
I bring up this exchange whenever people say stuff like “but what will the kids think? It will break their brains!”
Now, my mom teaching that to me DID cause some damage, because she forgot to add: “but you go to catholic school, so don’t repeat that or else you’ll get in trouble AND the other kids will bully you and the teachers won’t stop them”. Thankssss mom.
I remember being 10, hearing someone say the word “condom” for the first time (I was sheltered and raised in the wilderness for the first 20 years of my life and not allowed to go to school) and I was demanding to know what the word meant and my family just literally ignored me until I gave up asking.
They never gave me the talk, never talked about relationships, didn’t even ask me if I had questions, just completely ignored it as an issue.
Since all the reading material and television shows were curated and we weren’t allowed to watch anything remotely controversial, I have no idea how they expected me to learn the facts about one of the most important factors in our lives, sex and relationships.
I did eventually manage to sneak enough knowledge through occasional visits to bookstores and magazine racks that I was eventually able to piece it together. But there was so, so much else I was never equipped for. You would think that I would have grown up to a disastrous life and… you would be right.
Me when I was little: “mom, why are those guys holding hands?”
Mom: “well you know how you like girls? Some boys like boys. Some girls like girls.”
Me: “oh, cool. Mom, why are the street signs here blue but green in the other town?”
I bring up this exchange whenever people say stuff like “but what will the kids think? It will break their brains!”
Now, my mom teaching that to me DID cause some damage, because she forgot to add: “but you go to catholic school, so don’t repeat that or else you’ll get in trouble AND the other kids will bully you and the teachers won’t stop them”. Thankssss mom.
I remember being 10, hearing someone say the word “condom” for the first time (I was sheltered and raised in the wilderness for the first 20 years of my life and not allowed to go to school) and I was demanding to know what the word meant and my family just literally ignored me until I gave up asking.
They never gave me the talk, never talked about relationships, didn’t even ask me if I had questions, just completely ignored it as an issue.
Since all the reading material and television shows were curated and we weren’t allowed to watch anything remotely controversial, I have no idea how they expected me to learn the facts about one of the most important factors in our lives, sex and relationships.
I did eventually manage to sneak enough knowledge through occasional visits to bookstores and magazine racks that I was eventually able to piece it together. But there was so, so much else I was never equipped for. You would think that I would have grown up to a disastrous life and… you would be right.