Parents and Children and Sex - Oh My! (Part 1)

I spent this weekend with my family at a memorial service for my grandfather and his brother, who both passed away last year (don't worry, this is not a blog post about death). We spent Sunday afternoon at a lovely memorial luncheon that my dad organized, where everyone was sharing stories of my grandfather and great-uncle. They were a couple of characters, so a lot of the memories were very funny, colorful, poignant, sweet, all of the above.

Later that evening, still in a storytelling mood, I was sitting around with my immediate family, and we started telling stories about our sexual histories. Nothing too graphic, just things like first kiss stories, losing virginity stories, things that we somehow didn't know about each other. It's funny how you can know so many things about your parents' lives (where they grew up, where they worked, who their childhood friends were), but for a lot of families (mine included), sex is just not something that's discussed. Those particular stories and memories are not shared, I guess out of some sense of propriety or ickiness.

My family is actually a lot more open about sex than most families I know. It helps that I do the work that I do, because it's made everyone feel a little more comfortable talking about sexual issues in the abstract. But before this weekend, we still had not broken the barrier of sharing our own personal experiences with one another (with the fascinating exception of my mother sitting me down the day after my 16th birthday and telling me it was okay if I wanted to start having sex, she was doing it when she was my age. I actually wasn't having sex yet then. Awkward...)

It seems like a shame. Parents are models for so much of our lives, whether we want to follow their wonderful example or avoid their terrible example. With the whole world being so hush-hush about dispensing actually useful information about sex, it's a shame that we don't talk about these things with our parents. If we did, maybe we could learn from their experiences instead of having to figure everything out for ourselves as if it were the first time anyone ever had sex.

I know it can be a little weird to talk about personal sex stuff with your parents or children, but it's also a great way to get closer as a family. For my family, this could only really happen when all the kids were already grown up and living scattered all over the country. I wish that we'd started talking about things earlier, so I actually could have taken advantage of my parents' and sister's knowledge and experiences as I was learning about my own sexuality.

Of course, there is also a lot of concern in our society about what is and is not appropriate to teach children about sex, so that's going to be our topic for tomorrow! Just figured I'd start it off on a bit of a personal note.

Anyone have any stories about sex talks with your family? I'd love to hear them!