It was strange being a parent. Despite being a parent of three and having been a parent for almost two decades, it still felt like I was a pale imitation of my own parents. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt like an imposter pretending to be a parent rather than being the force of nature my father was: absolutely rock solid in being resolute. He was the law, and that was that. And it wasn’t because he was controlling or hard – quite the opposite – but because he always seemed to know what to do. Me? I felt like I was creating a new brand of parenting style, based solely on ‘winging it’.

Despite this feeling of being out of my depth, perhaps what helped the most was using the same foundation of religion as my parents, taking my children to Sunday school like my parents before me. Perhaps it was keeping close to the church that allowed me the strength to continue even after my parents passed away before my second child was even born. Ironically, it was our firstborn, Jane, who had been the hardest to raise as the next two were far less stubborn and much better at listening. She was hard to handle when she was three and even harder when she was a teenager. But still… she was my little girl even if she was now 16 years old.

So, when she came to me one Saturday just as I was making myself a sandwich and asked if we could talk, I didn’t hesitate. Her serious tone worried me, but my gratefulness that she still felt comfortable enough to come to me overrode that. It was clear that it was as awkward for her sitting across from me in the living room as it was for me, so I spoke first, to ease her in.

“So, what do you want to talk about, honey?”

She hesitated, and when she did speak, it was clear that she needed to will herself into this. “I guess there’s no way of starting this so… I wanted to know if we could have The Talk, Dad.” If her cheeks could be any flusher, she’d be a tomato.

I tried not to panic by doing what I always did when challenged: break the situation into the sum of its parts. In this case, I focused on her body language: arms crossed, eyes staring at the wall, legs crossed but not bouncy or fidgety, which meant she wasn’t nervous. I knew what she looked like when she was nervous or about to confess to her wrongdoing. This wasn’t that. Something told me I needed to be direct, to the point, almost blunt. “You mean the sex talk?”

“Yeah,” she said after a slightly shorter hesitation.

“Hmm. I thought your mother covered this when you were fourteen about to start high school.”

“Oh, she did, but she was going on about the female reproductive process and so on.” She was getting more comfortable: arms and legs still crossed but eye contact now. “But I don’t need to know where babies come from.”

“Okay.” While I’d said the word in a mildly confused tone, pondering what she was actually asking, she’d deduced my tone to mean something else completely.

“I’m not pregnant, Dad. My virginity is still intact or whatever.”

I tried to hide it, but there was no way to hide my relief. Okay, she’s not pregnant, and she hasn’t had sex. We’re off to a good start. Now focus. “Okay, well…” Unfortunately, I was lost, so once again, I went with the flow, and instead of trying to remember what all my wife’s books said, I met her at her level. “…what are you asking then?”

Another pause, but this time before speaking, her arms were gesturing as she thought. She was thawing ever so slightly more. “What do boys want, I guess? I don’t know how else to put it.”

“What do boys want?”

“I mean, what do they like?”

I thought for a moment, but again, came up short, meaning I had to continue meeting her at her level. She doesn’t need a person in authority to tell her what to do. Not right now. Not at this moment. The fact that she came to you means she’s mature enough to know to ask. What she needs is a guiding hand: a firm one, but a hand of guidance. Trust your instincts: the moment to be a parent will come naturally later. “Honey, I’m going to need some context here in order to help you. Without it, I’d be flying blind.”

She nodded, understanding. “But do you promise not to tell Mom?”

“Jane, you know I can’t do that.” I noticed the slight pull-back, but I was prepared for this. “But I also hope you know that you can trust me to not only have your best interest at heart but give you the room you need to grow.”

“Which means you want me to tell Mom, right?”

I smiled; she was so clever. “I want you to feel that you can tell her. I won’t control what you tell her as much as I don’t want you to control what I tell her. Meaning I’ll only keep to myself what I feel I need to keep to myself.”

“So, if, for example, I told you that the party I went to last weekend, that two people I know, two people I go to school with, had sex there, would you tell Mom?”

 Okay, easy now. While the answer seems obvious, how you handle this will determine if she ever comes to you for advice ever again. “I’d ask you why you wouldn’t want me to tell your mother? And I don’t mean the superficial ‘oh she’ll get angry and ban me from ever going to another party’ reason.”

“But she will. You know she will.”

“Yes, but do you know why?”

“Of course: she’s afraid I’ll get pregnant.”

“That’s the superficial answer. It’s true, but dig deeper. Break it down. Why would she be afraid of you getting pregnant?”

“Because if the people at these parties are having sex, how long before I’m having sex?”

“That’s better. Now you know that her anger would be born out of worry. But dig deeper.”

“Deeper? What’s deeper?”

“I’m trying to get you to understand why her banning you from going to another party is not wrong. But I also want to get to the thing you’re really afraid of.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t care about the party. You care about your friends and are afraid your mother will keep you from seeing them.” She hesitated but nodded. “Okay, now why do you think she shouldn’t keep you from them?”

“Because they’re my friends.”

“Deeper.”

“Because they’re nice people. Good people. They’re not a bad influence or whatever.”

“And what about the person having sex?”

“I don’t know. I’m not really friends with them.”

“Well, then you have much less to be afraid of when you talk to your mother.” Jane went quiet, which did worry me as I thought I’d pushed her away. But as it turned out, she was thinking.

“It’s just that… some of my friends are friends with her. I mean, they’re teammates. They play First Team Hockey. And I…” She closed her eyes, holding back tears now.

“What is it, Jane? It’s okay, you can say it.”

She had to breathe, determined to hold back tears. “You know that I used to want to be on the team, but I didn’t make it.” She anticipated what I was going to say. “No, don’t. This isn’t about me being in the Second Team. It’s not about that. Well, kinda.” She sucked it up, finally leaning forward, getting to what she really wanted to speak of. “I wanted to be in First Team to be popular. It’s the same reason I wanted a boyfriend. I wanted to fit in. And you know, we girls talk about boys and how to get their attention. And it works. We always notice when they’re looking. But it wasn’t until last weekend that I wondered what the conclusion was.”

“The conclusion?”

“Yes. Get in the team; get the boy; get popular. But then what? And after we heard, you should have heard what Stacy and them were saying. All they can talk about is sex.”

“What: they think having sex with their boyfriends is going to make them popular?”

“That’s the thing; the debate; what they can’t stop talking about. And all I keep wondering is: we want boys for all these reasons, but what do boys want?”

“Nothing I think I can say,” I said, mostly to myself.

“Dad, please. Look, I’m not trying to trick you into learning how to present myself so I can be prey to these boys. I’m just trying to understand why sex is such a big deal to both sides. We’re clearly clueless about this, so what about boys?”

“If you’re asking if boys have any more idea about sex than girls, I can tell you, no.”

“Yeah, I figured that, Dad, but I mean, what about us turns them on enough that they think sex is the answer? Is it like having an itch and sex is the scratch?”

That’s shockingly closer than you think, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. “Well, look, there are many ways I can answer this. If you want the superficial, face-value answer, then what turns a boy on is, yes, your looks.” When I’d stopped there, she gave me a ‘go on’ look, almost screaming it at me.

“Like what: boobs; ass; thighs? So, we grow mammaries on our chest? So what? So, we shave our legs instead of our faces; so what?”

“Well,” I said, fighting my discomfort, “like I said, that’s the superficial answer. A deeper answer is that due to hormones, sex is like a drug, but not the illegal kind, but more like the kind you need a prescription for and young people- people your age- you just don’t have a prescription for it yet.”

This analogy seemed to enlighten her, because her pause was because she was thinking rather than nervous. “Sex is a prescription drug?” I was afraid to nod, not knowing if I’d gone too far. But she must have seen my silence as an affirmation. “But that means, when you have the prescription, sex is actually good for you.”

“When you have the prescription,” I clarified.

“Yeah, I got it, I think. I’m just trying to reconcile that because, I’ll be honest. My little crisis of faith or whatever you call it came about because Mom’s Talk, two years ago, actually scared me straight. I’m not going to lie. The way she described how a boy’s sperm squirts into a vagina and hardens around the most fertile eggs from her ovaries put me off sex.” She didn’t notice my smile. “That’s like kissing a boy, and then he just spits a huge gob in your mouth.” She made a vomit face.

“Well, I’d say sorry she scared you like that, but then I’d be lying.”

“But now…”

Oh crap. “But now what? Jane, don’t you dare be going and learning the wrong lesson here.”

She scoffed and waved a hand dramatically. “Oh, don’t worry, Dad. I’m not losing my virginity any time soon. I mean, I still don’t see what boys see in us, so.”

“Hmm. Well, if you must know, and you promise not to have sex,” I said, standing up and walking to the bookshelf and returning with a page opened from a very old book, “then here.”

“Song of Songs.” She spoke without looking up. “Really, Dad? The Bible is going to teach me about se—” Her eyes popped open. “Whoa.”