I Take it Back!

I take back every judgment I made about mothers of teenagers before I had one.

“How can this be? How can she want to do this?” I asked myself after a sleepless night. My 14-year-old woman/ child has told me she needs birth control. I understand why she wants to have sex with a 16-year-old boy, but I don’t understand how she got to this place in her thinking, at this age.

“I did everything right!” I wail. The early pre-dawn fall light hides my tears (maybe), as I take her to be picked up by a big yellow school bus. It is grossly incongruous. My child who wants to have sex cannot even drive. She is not allowed to date, so how can she have sex?

“Where will you consummate this? You can only see him at school. I don’t want you to do this on some dirty mattress or standing in an alley some place. I don’t want you to do this at all! I know you care for each other, but some things in life you have to wait for,” I say to her, hoping good ideas will penetrate her thoughts. “You are not meant to have an adult expression of love and commitment at your age,” because you are a child is what I really want to say. I worry about the terrible angst and possible desolation of spirit for her when the inevitable occurs.

I note the childish tone in my protests for only a second. It is too appalling that she wants to have sex with a boy who has a man’s working anatomical parts but not a man’s wisdom and caring, let alone a job or a car. Part of me wants to protest that she won’t even enjoy it because he will finish with her way too quickly for her to enjoy anything. What am I thinking? I don’t want her to enjoy it! I want her to be disappointed! No, that’s not true either. What I really want is that neither of us should be thinking about any of this. She still sleeps with stuffed animals. How can she be ready for sex?

Again, I make a mental list of what I’ve taught my daughter to help her avoid this very dilemma. We live a spiritually-based life, praise her accomplishments and have had frank discussions about sex and the advantages of waiting for it. In the end, I know those common-sense things matter, but they still have not steered her away from this.

What I really wonder is how she went from meeting this boy at school, to hand-holding, to wanting to have sex at her age. What is driving that locomotive besides hormones? Why is it that some kids, and I do mean kids, choose not to date at all (my son), to date only in groups, or to date but not have sex? Why isn’t hand-holding enough for her? She saw those popular young Christian speakers on tapes encouraging abstinence. She runs with other girls whose mothers did not want their daughters to be having sex.

They did though.

At least half of the girls that used to jump on our trampoline into the twilight of a long spring evening, giggling and laughing with each other, unaware of their budding breasts, are now sexually experienced at 16 and 14. In spite of cultural encouragement from church groups, school speakers and concerned and involved parents who speak openly about sex and pregnancy, the outcome is that these girls chose to be adults too soon.

Though I agonized, I made the decision to take her for birth control counseling with her pediatrician (again, an incongruous word association), because I think the greater loss would be a pregnancy. It was apparent that she had already made a decision that was not mine to make. All I could do now was give her the best and safest contraceptive and disease-prevention options for use if she carried out her decision. Unfortunately, I thought, I cannot prevent the heartache that I would like to spare her any more than my mother could when I was too young, unprotected and uneducated to have sex.

But wait, I take that back, too... the resignation that I must go along with this quietly. Why did I think I could not do anything about this? My righteous indignation finally prevailed. These two children were mistaken if they thought they could step into sexual activity without interference. I started by telling my daughter to have this boy call me. That really surprised her.

“What are you going to say to him?” she asked.

“That’s between me and him,” I retorted, feeling mother-power surge through me.

In addition to musing about what I would say to this young man, I looked up the legal issues on the Internet and discovered that even if my daughter said “yes,” the law considers a 14-year old “incapable” of consent. That meant I had an option to introduce legal sanctions with the boy.

I also typed out a nice letter to the boy’s mother saying, “Your son is welcome to be a friend to my daughter, but I would like to discuss this situation,” and left it on her door. My plan was to give the boy an opportunity to be the friend he claimed by remaining platonic and to garner his mother’s parental support if she was uninformed of their plans for sex. If she was aware and was not going to intervene, I wanted them all to know that I was prepared to press charges.

Since the likelihood of them having sex was still very high and their submission to parental advice very low even if those conversations took place, I kept the doctor appointment open. However, when I woke her up to go, my daughter she said she no longer needed it; she was not having sex because the boy had broken up with her the previous day. I told her I was sorry for her pain but not sorry that she has to wait for sex until what I hope is much later. The other surprise was that within two days she was her sweet former self. Anot­her dodged bullet.

There is nothing as humbling as a crisis involving your own child to act as a reminder to keep your words tasteful. You may have to eat them someday.

Jean Hill lives in Kentucky with her daughter, who she hopes will have a good journey into adulthood.

~Jean Hill