A Spy In The House of What Is It Exactly?

This week’s assignment was one that I found particularly appropriate. My son is 11 years old and my daughter is 9, and if the rate at which I am buying new pants and shoes is any indication, I think we are rapidly approaching puberty, which has made me reflect long and hard on my own experiences.
The readings from this week’s assignments brought me back to the Health and Biology classes that I had to take in junior and high school. I remember understanding very little of the material, but it may have been because I was giggling over the photos of boy’s development, and hotly embarrassed over the pictures of girl’s development in the text books. I learned about the physical changes of puberty much like a few of the children in the introduction of the chapter, in quiet late night conversations with my sleeping-over girlfriends, by researching in my older sisters’ trashy Jackie Collins novels or by half-listening during my classes at school. It all felt so clandestine, and mysterious, like I was some ne’erdowell spy looking for some kind of information that if someone actually had to tell me, they would then have to kill me. My parents, being of an older generation than most of my peers, were decidedly close-mouthed about the whole experience, at odds with the fact that my mother was a nurse.
I spent my summers at our home in Vermont with my parents. My brothers and sisters were upwards of eight years older than I was and so much of my time was spent in the company of my mom and dad. I remember having my first period in the August of my 11th year. My mother must have been doing the laundry and noticed some blood stains, and I remember laying in the top bunk of my bed and my mom coming in, waking me up and red-faced explaining the process of menstruation, about how my body was getting older and changing, but in her stilted explanations she failed to mention the changes in relation to *gasp* S-E-X. I was still half-asleep, but I nodded and tried not to look her in the eyes. I had already discovered the secret a few days earlier, and pretty much had figured out what was going on from my surreptitious and calculated fact-gathering.
At that time, I was not quite yet privy to all of the information about the periods in my household, but after a few months I would find out how the Blatchford girls historically had periods so painfully debilitating and irregular that I would soon be spending random days out of school in such physical agony near to the point of fainting. At the time I wondered, how could someone so skinny lose that much blood and not die? I often felt that I wanted to die from the pain, and my dad, in on the family secret I imagined only through necessity, would prescribe from his living room chair, “an aspirin, some gin and a M1 helmet.” From beyond the code of silence, over the coming years, our collective periods were dealt with through humor, but still, sex, or even the idea of what my brother may have gone through was not discussed in front of me.
 Sex made me ridiculously curious. I was preternaturally annoying about knowledge in general as a child; I needed to know everything, all the time, right now. And adolescence had kindled a new fire in me, there was something that everyone was keeping from me and I needed to know what it was. Jackie Collins, for all her raunchy descriptions, did actually very little to inform me about the process of sex and how it related a boy to me. I needed, although unaware of the pun at the time, hard facts. I remember picking through some of my sister’s things and stumbling upon her birth control pills, something that she had clearly forgotten to take, which had caused a minor scandal in our household, and poring over the information packet folded inside the funny yellow hexagram. She caught me with them and I tried to explain that I knew she wasn’t using them so why couldn’t I just see what they’re… That was not a pleasant day.
 Thankfully, school came to my rescue. I was able to piece together a somewhat cohesive picture between my own findings and what happened biologically as described by my science teacher. I am thankful for sex education, because I sure wasn’t getting it at home.
 Which as I have come to believe has informed my relationship with my own son and daughter. As my husband and I had compared notes on the subjects of puberty, development and sex, we found that neither of us were ever told anything from our parents that we a.) didn’t actually figure out already b.) could relate ourselves to another human being. We had made a decision together that we would answer any of our kids’ questions with as little or as much detail as they asked for. We have been pretty honest with them about their private parts, how and where babies are made and what happens as you get older and how they will change. I was always surprised at how satisfied they would seem with just some small description and they would move on, either we could congratulate ourselves that we had successfully sated their curiosity with our deliberate matter-of-factedness, or my husband and I could admit that maybe they just had very short attention spans.
Still, despite all this preparation, I feel like I should be doing something right now to prepare them for the physical storm about to brew. My son is heading into middle school in the next year, and I feel like I still haven’t told him enough to prepare him for the sexual onslaught that junior high can bring. I have taught middle and high school for a while and I know how rife with misinformation and confusion and ridicule this time of life is. I know that soon, we will have to sit down and have, not just the short Q&A, but the real life “talk.” But then again, can’t I just do what my parents did? We have always had books about the human body lying around, maybe I will just leave the chapter on puberty open on the coffee table and hope that “someone” picks it up and does a little clandestine spy research of his own.
I know. I know. It was just a thought.