Forgive me for repeating an oft-stated story regarding sexuality, teen pregnancy, and abortion issues, but the recent dairies on S403 and
Janusdog's beautiful and sad personal story, I feel compelled to vent and to share my own...
I was raised "in the country" outside of Waco, TX. My father is a staunch conservative Mark Davis, Rush Limbaugh loving kind of guy who reads Molly Ivins to get his heartrate up in the morning and "make sure I'm still alive". My mother was raised Methodist and started out raising us Methodist, but when parishoners of our church were caught embezzling money from the church, we stopped going. She still blames all of my faults on her "failure as a mother to make sure we kept going to church", though she's finally given up on nagging me to find a new church to go to. She's since become Southern Baptist (combined Baptist/Methodist church in a tiny town - you get those two groups combined, though, and everyone ends up Baptist.)
On to sex, neither my sister nor I ever got "the birds and the bees" talk from either of our parents. Not that I would relish such akwardness, but I'm still just a little resentful over that and vow to do differently by my own kids some day. My best friend when I was about 10 told me after her parents had told her. I didn't believe her, so she said "ask your parents", but I was too embarassed. My grandmother (dad's stepmom) is a marvelously mouthy lady who would ask my parents "have you told these girls the facts of life, yet? They're going to find out someday whether you tell them or not, and you'd rather tell them yourself." This would be at Christmas or Easter dinner, and I'd just stand akwardly staring at my feet pretending to not know what they were talking about. This sort of elephant in the room made me so embarassed that when the permission slips went around in 5th grade for the health lesson on "what happens to a girl's body as she grows up", I forged my mom's signature and hid the information in my bottom dresser drawer. So finally when I was about 13, my mother called me into her bathroom looking like she wanted to DIE of embarassment. The conversation went something like this:
Mom: "Do you know...?"
Me: "Uh yeah"
Mom: "Good, you might need these some day" and she handed me a box of sanitary napkins.
This would have been more appropriately handled in greater detail a year earlier when I'd actually gotten my first period and walked around school all day with a sweater tied around my waist, but hey...
So my first boyfriend broke up with me because my dad sat him down one day to tell him he didn't like how close the guy's hand came to by breast when he put his arm around my shoulder and he'd better not try anything inappropriate with me. I later broke my hand punching a wall after the second guy that I got interested in wouldn't speak to me because he'd heard my first boyfriend broke up with me for not "putting out." So when my next boyfriend (I was 16) came along and said "baby, look at what you're doing to me. It hurts. You need to do something about it," I caved. Fortunately I was smart enough to go to a clinic to get on the pill. Fortunately I was lucky enough that he wasn't carrying any diseases because there was no one there to sit me down for that talk, either.
Fastforward a year. My mom and I are ironically sitting in church oneday when she looks down and sees my birth control pack in my purse (oops). She waited until that night at home to scream at me about it. The bottom line was "don't ever do that again. At least not until you're married." Fortunately for her, my boyfriend and I had just broken up, but I was heartbroken over it and just couldn't stand to see how thrilled it made her.
I'm 28 now and have been happily commited to my now-fiance for 5 years. We moved in together after we'd been dating for a year and knew we were in this for the long term. We haven't married already because, well, he's a starving musician, and I was a starving grad student and we didn't have the time or money to plan a wedding, but we knew we wanted to live our lives together. When I called to tell my parents that we were moving in together, my dad said "Well, I don't agree with it, but you know that, and that's all I'll ever say about it." And that's all he has ever said about it. We have great mutual respect like that. My mom, on the other hand, turned it into 2 hours of screaming, crying, and begging me not to do it because it would "look bad" and it "isn't the way she raised me." We did it anyway. Still, 4 year later and with a ring on my finger, we sleep in separate rooms when we go to visit them. She even booked two hotel rooms for my cousin's wedding - one for me, her, and my sister; the other for my dad and boyfriend. I can respect her desire for us to sleep apart since she doesn't condone our sexlife and doesn't want it under her roof (not that we'd ever do anything in my parents' house anyway - EW, but I get more of the feeling that if we sleep in separate rooms in her house, she can pretend that we don't sleep together in our own.
At some point when I was in college, I realized that I didn't like this aspect of my upbringing (my parents are WONDERFUL in so many other respects and have raised me very well), so I decided to have a talk with my younger sister (3 1/2 year difference). When I tried to be frank with her, her response was "Don't worry, I'm not going to make the same mistakes YOU did." Ouch.
Finally, I want you to imagine this young girl that I was, 16 years old, unable to even talk about my period with my mom, let alone my sexlife. Thank GOD I never got pregnant and had to "deal with it" myself. I would have likely been searching out ways to poison myself into a miscarriage or throwing myself down the stairs (both things I seriously contemplated as options). Or could have been one of those girls to starve or bind myself to keep from gaining an alarming amount of weight that would trigger suspicion. I could have been one of those girls who delivers in the school bathroom and abandons the baby because I never wanted anyone to know I'd been pregnant. But one thing I do know is that I NEVER would have told my parents that I wanted an abortion.