Controversy Concerning Contraception

There seem to be a lot of people in the Christian community (Hi! Christian Community!) who pitch holy fits (literally) when you suggest teaching kids to wear condoms if they have sex.

In the tradition of Forest Gump, I have something to say about that. You can sit here on the bench with me and listen for a bit or you can walk off. It won't hurt my ...

Hey! Get back here! I didn't actually MEAN that.

Okay, the main arguments that I've heard on both sides:

Pro-condom Expect Nothing Insulting Sourpusses or PENIS' say:

Kids are going to have sex. That's all there is to it. They can't expect to be taught to abstain, it's beyond them. Teach them to be responsible about protecting themselves when, as is inevitable, they have sex.

Teachers Only of Abstaining Sex Text Sourpusses or TOASTS say:

If you teach kids to protect themselves, you are teaching them that you expect them to have sex and reinforce the idea. Because, of course, kids are idiots who can't be expected to entertain a thought without accepting it.

My acronyms might have given away the fact that I don't really think much of either approach.

Hang on tight folks! We're heading to memory lane:

Many, many moons ago when I was but a child my mother took me to the drug store and humiliated me. Actually, she's done that many, many times, some of them not so many moons ago but never mind about the incident of the facial hair bleach that must not be mentioned. [shudder]

No, I'm talking about when my Mom took me to the contraception counter smorgasbord and not only showed me everything on it but talked in excruciating detail at a completely unacceptable volume about exactly what each device, cream and foam did. [double shudder]

This was part of my Mom's promise ring program (It's not a MMORPG, it's a MOMPRG!). You've heard of promise rings, right? Hmm. No Jonas brothers fans then.

Okay, a promise ring is a ring you wear to show you have already made a commitment to your future spouse. Talk about marriage being for a lifetime. Basically, you pledge to remain a virgin until married.

Now, my Mom didn't show up one day with a ring and say, "You don't wanna be a slut, right? Put this ring on and promise me, as God is your witness, that you won't do dirty things with dirty boys. PROMISE!!!"

That would have been disturbing.

What she did do is take me out to lunch every day for a week. (Can I just say for a kid that is AWESOME!?!) At lunch she talked about sex...a lot.

She talked about how wonderful it was and how much she enjoyed it (and honestly, I didn't need to hear that part). She talked about how hormones generally try to hijack your life as a teen. She talked about her views on sex. She talked about how sex was presented in the Bible (Psst! The Song of Solomon is just filthy!). She talked about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases...with visual aides (once again, could have done without those).

She stressed that it was a deeply personal decision. She told me about the time she came very close to having sex as a teen and how she was almost instantly glad it hadn't happened. When it came to opinion she usually only gave it when I asked her directly.

The second to last lunch was the infamous drug store disaster. I don't think I've ever blushed that much before or after that incident and I once had the neck strings to my swimsuit come untied at a pool party. I never retied strings so fast in my life but several guys still picked me up and paraded around the pool with me over their heads while everyone else in attendance (and I do mean EVERYONE) patted by butt like it was a dang lucky charm. That was humiliating and yet the drug store disaster is still number one on my list of humiliating escapades.

Back to the POINT, when we walked out of that store I knew exactly what did what to whom, where, why and how. I knew that spermicidal foam protected against pregnancy but not against disease and that a condom protected against both disease and pregnancy. I learned that neither was fool proof and that Mom would personally prefer it if I just used every darn thing on the shelf.

I was given a night to sit and simmer over what we'd talked about that week. The next day, which was the last weekday and the last of our five lunches, my Mom asked me if I thought pledging to remain a virgin till marriage was something of which I thought I was capable. She stressed it wasn't a good idea to make a pledge I didn't think I could or didn't expect I could keep. She also said that she would respect my honesty with both her and myself if I said no.

I said yes. My Mom gave me a gold ring (stands for purity) with a little gold heart (stands for the promise to my future spouse) with a little silver cross inside (stands for my promise to God). She told me that if I ever, like she very nearly had, broke that promise it wasn't the end of the world (note the lack of judgment in the presentation? LOVE my Mom). She did, however, ask that I remember to use every last blessed thing on that shelf and to please take off the ring at that point.

I wore the ring until I replaced it with my engagement ring. I'll also say that my beautiful Hubby (mwah!) presented me with a lovely gold chain along with that engagement ring so that I could continue to wear my promise ring around my neck. How sweet is that? I mean, c'mon! He's just fabulous!

I've only ever had sex with my hubby and I really LOVE sex. I'm not going to try to conclude that the reason I have an extremely health sexual appetite is because I've only had the one partner. I CAN say that only ever having one partner doesn't seem to have hurt me.
I do think that my Mom did an excellent job of balancing the value of abstinence with the necessity of educating me against very real dangers and the equally real peer pressure and hormones with which kids must contend...or not as the case may be.

In THIS case I happen to think my Mama is right. Life is like a box of condoms: If you have sex without one, you never know what you're going to get.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Me, The Monkey And Mommy Memories

Last night...Ooooh! Strokes song!

Last niiiight, she saiiiid
Oh baby I feel so downnn....

Ahem.

Sorry.

(Paul Harvey Voice) And now it's time for: the rest of the story.

Last night I was playing a bed game with my son, the Monkey (aka Jonathan). A bed game is a rough housing game that has to be played on Mommy and Daddy's queen size bed. (See! See?! I run the house! I am the queen! There is no king size bed, thus there is no king! There is only me, the queen of all I see! Mwahahahaha!!!)

And now back to regularly scheduled blogcasting.

The Monkey and I are playing the newly invented game, Kiss Your Nose. In Kiss Your Nose someone kisses the other person's nose while that other person tries very hard to prevent them from doing so. I try to keep things as even as possible in these games. For example, the Monkey can't restrain my arms, so I don't restrain his.

Oh yeah! When one of us manages to kiss the other we stand (me on my knees, him on his feet) and stage yell, "I'm the Champion! I'm the Champion!" Until the freshly kissed/defeated person gets up and tackles the triumphant.

I had just successfully kissed the Monkey on his nose and was about to start my victory cheer when I felt a spasm in my throat. I have asthma and usually I get a nice long warning that something is up. I'll smell a chemical or pollen or some other trigger. Most of the time, I'll feel a subtle tightness that gradually increases. Very rarely does an attack sideline me out of nowhere.

This one did. I made a funny noise then started this weird gagging type thing I do where I'm trying to get air out but some of the various tubes in my throat have suddenly swelled up. The thing is, most of them don't close but my body reacts like it has to get air out of ALL of them NOW. So, it tries to do this coughing, forcing thing. I usually have this overwhelming need to clear my throat and have to override it because I know that there is nothing in my throat and the act of trying to clear it exacerbates the problem.

The same thing goes for coughing; coughing does nothing but further irritate everything and makes the swelling everywhere worse. It is to be avoided and slow, deep breaths trying to sort of breathe around the swollen shut tubes are the way to go.

The Monkey reacted immediately. He looked at me and said, "Mommy, you coughing?" I nodded (even though I wasn't actually coughing at that time, coughing is what the Monkey calls an asthma attack). My three year old son jumped down from the bed, ran to the bedside table, opened the drawer and grabbed my inhaler. He brought it to me yelling, "Here your medicine, Mommy. Take your medicine."

By the time I took the medicine the shallow breaths had gone from wheezing to those weird barking noises that are the step right before unavoidable coughing. But the medicine did its job and stopped the attack. As I lay back sideways on the top of the bed trying to breath in the medicine, the Monkey sat next to me with this studious expression and a hand on my chest.

I felt guilty. It might be stupid to feel that way since I have little to no control over my asthma but I did feel guilty. We had been having a good time, playing a game and I ruined it. Another thing that both made me proud and bothered me was how ably the Monkey had handled it.

I was proud because he had stayed calm and known exactly what to do which is amazing in a toddler. I was bothered because he's a toddler, dang it! I don't think he should have to deal with his Mom having fits.

Now, Mom, if you're reading this don't take that the wrong way. My Mom is epileptic and had seizures when I was a kid. There was one time, she had been standing in the front doorway when she had a seizure and she hit her head on the door frame.

The blow opened up a deep gash over one of her eyes. When I responded to my older sister's screams and arrived in the living room my Mom had just stopped twitching and I watched her go still. Her eyes were open and blood had pooled in one socket. She was still, a bluish pale color, her face covered in blood, completely unresponsive and staring at the ceiling. I honestly thought she was dead.

My sister told me to stay with her while she ran to the neighbor's trailer because we didn't have a phone to call for help. After an eternity she came back alone. No one had answered the door. The next trailer was down the street at least a block away, if not more. (We lived in the countryside so there weren't any acutual blocks but I'm trying to create a referenceable unit of distance.) I ran all the way and when I got there was completely out of breath. I finally managed to get across that my Mom was hurt and our neighbor took me back to my house.

When we got there our otherer neighbor was already there. He'd heard my sister knocking and yelling but hadn't been dressed. When he'd grabbed some clothes, he came over.

That was a really awful day for me. The next day my Mom dropped me off at kindergarten and was talking to my teacher. Mom looked terrible with a big black eye and stitches etc. So, of course, she had to explain to my teacher what happened. My teacher turned to me and joked, "Did you do that to your Mama?"

I was young enough to not get the joke. I thought she seriously believed me capable of hurting my Mom in such a terrible way. I burst into tears and said, "No! I love my Mama. I don't want her to die!" It took a long time for them to calm me down.

I guess I'm remembering that and I don't want it to be that way for the Monkey. I don't want him to worry about me the way I worried about my Mom. I don't want him to watch me driven off in an ambulance the way I saw her go too many times. However, writing this has made me see something. I don't blame my Mom for being sick. Why am I blaming myself?

I guess it's not going to be the best thing in the world for the Monkey but it's not going to horribly scar him either. I lived through it. He will too.

So, I guess this was a bit of blog therapy. Who knew?

Talking To Myself

I was looking for a document and found a letter I wrote to my sister a couple years ago. The first paragraph made me laugh at myself, so I decided to post it and hopefully give everyone else a laugh as well.

Dated September 26, 2007:

As I sat and wrote this, I asked myself, “Why am I not just emailing her?”

Since I talk to myself quite a bit, myself answered, “Because then she would have to be in front of the computer in order to read it. Whereas, (myself talks very scholarly when myself talks to me) if you send her an actual letter, she can read it at her leisure wherever she may be.”

Then, because I’m a smartass, I answered “But she has a laptop now. She can read email at her leisure wherever she may be.”

So myself said, “Not the BEACH! She wouldn’t want to get sand in the laptop at the beach and she goes there ALL THE TIME!!! So SHUT UP!”

Then I said that myself was cranky and to get some freaking Midol and the conversation just went downhill from there.