Conflicting Messages
I don’t think I’m alone in having received conflicting messages about sex as a kid. Neither do I think I’m alone in having consciously chosen to go my own way, despite the (conflicting) expectations that were laid out before me. Within my own family, however, I seem to be alone in choosing to analyze the examples that were set for me and consciously choose NOT to follow them.
This applies to a lot of things: how I utilize money, what I choose to spend my time and energy doing (both for work and for leisure), which sociocultural viewpoints I align myself with, etc.
But one thing that it definitely applies to is sex.
How My Mother Thought About Sex
My mom… She left the Catholic church at 17 (something about being het up about a priest’s haranguing about mini skirts) and married my father, her first husband, at 19. And while maybe things would have been different if she had *only* been a recovering Catholic when she made that choice, the truth of the matter was that she traded Catholic Guilt for Evangelical Righteousness (my father went to what was then called ‘a Bible church’), and then — after finally deciding (after years of being cheated on — it’s acceptable for MEN to go astray, of course; it’s practically part and parcel to Proper Religion) that it was okay to get divorced (14 years later) from that man when attempted to kill her the first time1 — wound up so enmeshed in the guilty religious horror at her own choice{s} that she promptly made another [bad] choice, and got married again. To absolutely the wrong person.
And I say all this because I think it shows how my mom thought about sex.
You see, she married the first man she had sex with.
Because that’s what she thought she was supposed to do.
And after she got divorced from that man, she AGAIN married the first man she had sex with post-divorce.
Because to her way of thinking, you’re not *supposed* to have sex if you’re not married. And if you DO have sex, you’d better be trotting down the aisle (or to the front of the judge’s chambers) as immediately as possible afterward.
So without meaning to teach me that sex = marriage (and marriage = misery), the main message I got from my mother about sex was, Thou Shalt Not Fuck.
What She SAID (as opposed to What She DID)
Now, when I was a teenager, I pretty much wasn’t interested in sex. Not in the opposite sex, not in sexual exploration, just… NOT.
And maybe that’s why my mom thought it would be okay to say to me, “If you think you’re going to start having sex with someone, I want you to come to me about it.” She wanted me to be honest with her and told me that if I was, she would support me in getting birth control or in “anything else that might come up as a result.”
Like, I think she thought that she could say that and that her saying those words would be the end of it. That I would not ever be interested in sex while living under her roof, because I’d demonstrated ZERO interest in that direction through the majority of my teenagehood, therefore negating any need to follow through on her words. So she probably thought she could say “Talk to me about it” and that saying those words to me would make me feel (hypothetically) secure in talking to her about it, but that she would never *actually* have to deal with it.
And then, when I was 17, I had sex.
And I told her that I had done so.
(I think it came out as “I need to make an appointment to get birth control” which basically led to the further info of, “I’ve done this already. We used condoms, but I want more security than that.”)
And she FLIPPED. OUT.
So, to recap: She told me to talk to her when the time came. I did so. She flipped out.
The message I came away with: What my mother says about sex and what she means are two entirely different things.
And: She thinks less of me (her actual words were, “I thought you would wait! I thought you were better than me!”) because I had sex2 with someone. Which, of course, means that she thinks less of herself for having [ever] had sex.
And it explains SO MUCH…
It explains why she stayed married to her first husband so long.
It explains why she is still married to her second husband.
And if you add in the religious bits that no doubt plague her thinking, it explains The Martyred Approach3 she takes to everything.
In her current (second) marriage, for instance: She made the horrid mistake of having had sex (!) which led to ‘having to’ get married, right? Which means that all the things about that marriage that suck — the man she married, his asshole children, their choices that she has suffered for over the years, etc. — are her penance. She thinks she *deserves* it somehow, but likewise knows she deserves better. And so she makes herself a martyr to the needs of undeserving people.
All because?
She had sex.
How These Messages Have Translated
I’m not sure my mother ever consciously thought about the messages she was sending me (and my siblings) about sex, but what I came away with — as a result of wanting to be UN-like my mother — was:
- Sex is just sex. It does not a marriage make. It does not a long-term commitment require.
- Sex is nothing to feel guilty about or to base major life decisions on.
- Religion and Sex, in my life, do not mix.
- Sexual partnership requires communication and honesty but it does not mandate any other kind of responsibility to that partner, especially not responsibility to/for that partner’s asshole children.
- When someone asks me for information or assistance in any sexual matter — birth control, especially — I give it cheerfully.
There are more, of course. Offshoots of this.
Ultimately, my mother’s conduct — as influenced by her thoughts/feelings/beliefs about sex — has made me consciously think about how I will approach a great many things. (And how I will *not* approach them — live and learn.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1Yes, the first time. It’s a long story; it was the night before my 12th birthday and I was the primary witness. Suffice to say I’m not going there in my blog today. Or probably any day, ever.
2I know that What even IS sex? is a question that bears scrutiny (and if you like those kinds of conversations, you are welcome to dig through my archives), but as a teenager ‘having sex’ meant PIV intercourse.
3Granted, some of the things she has done along this line needed to be done. If she hadn’t stepped in and cared for my stepsister’s kids, for example, they would have been in a much worse place than they ended up. (The fact that my stepsister’s kids were the result of two teenage pregnancies was one of the reasons I advocated for birth control for myself, BTW. Which you’d have thought my mother would have APPRECIATED. Yeesh.)
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Sounds like similar things I’ve heard from other women and how some parents are all “do as I say and not as I do.” I was taught that there can be no sex without marriage and, one day, I got myself into big trouble because I’d done the math and knew when my parents got married and… mom got pregnant with me before marrying dad… and I stupidly called them on it because what they were telling wasn’t what they did and why?
I had two weeks in my room to contemplate the error of my ways and how dare I question what they obviously did and don’t do what we did. I wouldn’t say that my parents were weird about sex but they weren’t all that forthcoming about it and found it easier on their sensibilities to tell me (and my siblings) what not to do before we were married. Oh, the stories I could tell and you’ve read a lot of them. “Do as I say, not as I do” did not work for me. Neither did religious nonsense about sex and sexuality.
The word was, “Thou shalt not fuck!” while knowing that at some point, we’re going to fuck. Make up our minds already!
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Yes. And it makes me wonder when sex before marriage was ever NOT a common thing. My minor for my BA was History, and I know from even just the minimal cultural/anthropological information I skimmed during that time, sex was a common precursor to marriage (again, though, probably because of sex = marriage expectations) as far back as the written-in-English documentation goes in this country.
She may have meant it when she said it, then freaked out when she found out it was real.
My mother was a Roman Catholic her whole life. Grew up wanting to be a nun, but had sex with my father to get back at G-d for taking her mother (my mother was a complicated woman). She always said to talk to her before I did anything. I was a good girl and didn’t do anything. I brought a guy home one day – well, he picked me up and knocked so he could meet my mother before he took me out. She liked him. A lot. Three days later we were at the OBGYN for me to get on birth control. When I was like, “but why?” She said because I better be, he’s a panty-dropper. Uhm…. ewww. Ultimately, she was right, but a better way could have been found to communicate that.
Anyway, my mother told all of my friends that too, and my sisters and their friends. She took every last one of them for birth control too and gave them all the fire-and-brimstone speech as well. Not the “if you have sex you’ll go to hell” speech, but the “if you think this protects you and don’t use condoms… guuuuurrrrrlllll…. you’ll answer to ME.” Yeah, we all used condoms. She was scarier than any next life stuff. We had to survive THIS life to get to the next life, and she could make THIS life quite painful.
But she also gave out mixed messages. Sex was good – to make babies. Sex was bad if you didn’t want babies. Sex ALWAYS led to babies, even double protected sex. Sex should happen in marriage or you’d end up like her: crying her eyes out after the first time as her motivations were all wrong and she regretted it. But do it just like her: have sex with a man you can trust and who will accept you – because he’ll be the man you marry someday (not that we had to marry them, but we should be more selective about who we spread our legs for). Just all over the place.
In the end, I ultimately got such mixed messages that the only message that made sense was: have sex to make baby. And since I didn’t want that… it made for much confusion, and the older I got the less I wanted babies, and so… the less sex I was having. Awesome mixed messaging from a woman who wanted us to know our worth.
I think she may have meant it when she said it, but with caveats she didn’t voice.
Interesting approach your mom took to birth control. Because of the way my mom handled my own birth control question, *I* am the one who took my younger sister to get birth control when she wanted it. (Which my mother lost her shit over when she found out.)
But yes, I definitely also hot that message: sex makes babies, don’t make babies.
My daughter had enough life examples to easily follow the practical advice I gave her which essentially boiled down to: sex is fine, unplanned pregnancy at too young an age will ruin your life. She saw tragic, living examples and the message stuck. She is now a successful professional and mother with a second planned child on the way.
Parents are people. Some know what they’re talking about, and others don’t. It sounds like you picked up on that early on.
What I Was Taught and What I Learned were definitely two different things. In more arenas than just this one.
I don’t think it’s a matter of topic knowledge, but an issue of values and beliefs. On the latter, I find mine rarely align with those of the people who have most sought to influence me throughout my life (or who ‘should’ have been primary influences). And that’s true of many topics/issues. Which is something I’m consciously examining in my life right now.
Oh I agree it’s not ‘topic knowledge’ but also not quite just belief/values issues either. Instead I think it’s either an inability or reluctance (for whatever reason) to clearly think things through. When imparted values don’t align with the person’s own behavior, I believe it’s proof that the person in question never analyzed the validity of the beliefs they claim to hold. ( Religion is a great example in that one can amass volumes of ‘topic knowledge’ of verses, theological perspectives, or catechism/dogma, and never actually sit down and objectively scrutinize the logic or validity of any of it. The sheer amount of ‘religious’ people who are routinely exposed for scandals that directly contradict their own preaching is ample evidence of that. For others I think the need for ‘something more’ results in their acceptance of the whole package so they can enjoy the security of being the object of some divine creator’s benevolence even at the cost of following oddball rules or suspending disbelief at things they would normally regard as fantastical. They then want their loved ones to enjoy that same security and pass these beliefs down with the best of intentions……but again, without any critical analysis of their validity.) Though expressed in the briefest of terms, this was kind of what I meant by “knowing what one is talking about”.
I get that.
And I think my mother places a lot of value on {perceived} security, which is what she thinks marriage is… Even though she’s LIVED the fact that it’s NOT. Combined with her views on sex=marriage, it has meant she’s made the choice to get married twice, both times being not-wise decisions.
I guess until you’re mature enough to make decisions for yourself, without your parents’ consent and approval, you probably aren’t grown up enough to be having sex, anyway.
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