When I was 14 years old, I traveled to Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, to visit my Aunt Grace and her family. A few weeks into my vacation I felt some cramps in my lower stomach and then discovered a speck of blood on my panties. I told my cousins about it and I remember having this subtle fear that I had done something wrong. I also feared that I had completely stepped out of my childhood.
My cousins told me to tell her mom. Aunt Grace called me into my room and, while she made me a makeshift sanitary pad, gave me the only advice I’ve ever gotten from a mother about sex: “If you have sex with a boy, you’ll get pregnant.”
At that time I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant because I didn’t have a boyfriend and I didn’t intend to have one. Better yet, the blood did not appear again for the next four months. However, three years later, at age 17, I began living alone on campus and soon had a boyfriend. Still, my entire sex education consisted of that one line from Aunt Grace.
To date, I have never had a genuine, honest conversation about sex with a competent female authority.
I appreciate my mother for the thousands of things she did beautifully, but I wish sex had been that one extra thing she had raised me about.
I know that she, as a mother of five girls and one boy, has had at least some education about sex, albeit from the school of hard knocks and lessons learned.
Why are parents afraid to open up and talk to their children about sex?
Do I wish my mother had told me that I could get STDs or get pregnant from having unprotected sex, and that being in an isolated place with a person of the opposite sex might tempt me to have sex?
I wish you had told me how my menstrual cycle works.
I wish she had explained to me that those kids I envied because they had boyfriends at a young age weren’t the ones to look up to.
I wish he had told me that if I choose to have sex it should be with someone who respects me. Or just wait to have sex with my husband when she’s married.
I wish you had explained to me what it is like when a man respects a woman.
I wish he would have told me I’m beautiful and validated myself so I wouldn’t seek validation from guys who may be misinformed about sex and under the control of raging hormones.
I wish, for the sake of my own preservation, he had taught me about birth control methods, including abstinence, and their advantages and disadvantages.
But she didn’t. Instead, I learned this information in bits and pieces over the years and through the consequences of my actions.
I think if my mother (or whatever mother figure I looked up to) had shown me the right path through puberty, instead of letting me stumble in the dark, I would have made different choices in my teen and young adult years.
I was impressionable at the age of 14; His words would have guided me. Such a conversation would have encouraged me to boldly go to my mother with any concerns about sex, and this could have made our relationship a thousand times richer at the time.
I’m not saying I could have been a better woman than I am now, but I could have had a more virtuous past. I don’t entirely blame my actions on a lack of sexual orientation, but with her I could have been more proud of myself and my parents could have enjoyed the benefits of her daughter making sexually empowered choices.
Instead, with my lack of knowledge, I repeatedly strayed down the dark path, causing my mother more than a few sleepless nights and the kind of anguish only a mother can feel.
I once left home when I was about 21, a graduate jobless and angry at the world. I left with just my phone and some cash and moved in with my boyfriend. I turned off my phone to avoid calls from home. I thought my boyfriend was my savior. He promised to make my life better in exactly all the ways I wanted, but his promises brought zero results and many tears. My mother had members of her church chain pray for me until I returned home.
I’m not proud of a lot of the decisions I made back then, but now I know better, so I do better.
I am not a mother yet, but when I am I plan to be a light for my children. I’ll teach you what I’ve learned about what’s right in life so you don’t have to learn it the hard way like I did, through experience.
I’m also on a mission to empower tweens and teens, especially girls, with sexual information that will help them make better decisions about sex. I make it a point to talk to every teen I know because most of them still don’t know anything about sex, just like I do.
I am currently writing an online teen self-assessment quiz designed to give them advice on sex and other topics based on the answers they provide. I plan to complete this quiz next month and release it soon after.
In addition, I blog about my views and experiences on my website to reach parents with children ages 9-14. I encourage you to genuinely talk to your children about sex.
Finally, I’m working on an e-book for teens that communicates knowledge about sex from a godly, big-sister perspective.
These are initiatives that I am passionate about, because I know that a change in direction at the point of the needle today is worth a great arc of change in the future.