As my daughter gets older I find myself eyeing every man that walks by and stares too long. She's a year and eight months but my mind is years in the future thinking about all the guns I'll need to set up around the house. I keep wondering when exactly we need to have "the talk" with her. I tried to think back over my own childhood and after reflecting on the talks that I got, NONE of those will work.
My first talk came when I was about five. I saw something on TV where the kid asked the parents about sex and the whole audience laughed. I had no clue what the joke was, but trying to be funny I raised the same question in the living room one day. "How many of yall are having sex?" That prompted my mother to take me to the Martin Luther King Library where she checked out a book called "Where Babies Come From." She gave me the book, told me to read it and to let her know if I had any questions.
The book used chickens as examples and it talked about the rooster impregnating the hen and a chick hatching from the egg. For about two months I thought my mother got pregnant by a rooster and I hatched from one of the eggs in the fridge. Then I was in Sunday School one day and they talked about the immaculate conception. I stated that babies came from chickens and the teacher corrected me saying that the Holy Spirit got Mary pregnant. I thought that applied to me, so for a couple of months I was going around telling people that God was my father. Because of the wording of that statement, no one corrected me. "Yes, God is everyone's father."
It wasn't until I was in school one day and proudly telling everyone that my mother was a virgin that a teacher pulled me to the side and told me to stop telling people that. It just so happened that one day I was looking through a book called "The Science Book" for science fair project ideas when I came across a section in the book about babies. I was about seven or eight. It was extremely graphic in explaining the actual act of copulation. So I read it and then I asked my grandmother if what I read was true.
She had me read the book to her at the kitchen table and then she asked me if I had any questions. I had a bunch. My first was, "It says that it swells with blood and becomes hard. Does that hurt?" She told me that it did. My next question, "It says that the hymen tears. Does that hurt a lot?" Her reply: "Everything about sex hurts. If it doesn't hurt you physically it destroys you mentally. It's the worst thing you can do to a woman. Half of these old no-good niggas lay up next to these women and mess up both of their lives. Then the women too stupid to realize that the man aint no good and go running after him all the time. Just a bunch of tramps. It's just bad! If you care anything about a woman or yourself, you avoid having sex at all costs. You look at half the adults around you and I bet you that if they aint done nothing with their lives it's because of sex and having children that they weren't ready for."
So at eight years old I decided upon a life of celibacy. You know what? Now that I think about it, I might go with that version of the talk with my daughter after all.
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