The Ugly Truth.

When I was in seventh grade, I was forced to sit through an excruciatingly awkward lecture on abstinence. No, I’m not being unfair. It was ridiculous. The speaker put on a pair of white gloves, said one glove was Ken and the other was Barbie, and then clapped his hands together, announcing to the humiliated room of adolescents that Ken and Barbie had just “performed intercourse.”

“Performed intercourse? What, is that a dance move I should know before I go to my first prom?”

As if the excitement of dollar store gloves performing intercourse wasn’t enough for our poor 12 and 13 year old souls to handle, we then got to draw cards to see who would catch herpes before our high school graduation.

“Yes! Party games! This is so much better than math class!”

And this, ladies and gentlemen, was the sex education I received from the Texas public school system, if you can even call it that.

Yet Texans wonders why their beloved state experiences well over a million teen pregnancies each year.

Let’s face facts. Here’s the hard, cold, ugly truth. Mom and Dad, cover your ears. Your teenagers are having sex. Protected or not, they’re doing it. Whether they share the same religion and beliefs as you do or their morals conflict, they’re out there, right now, doing the dirty, and they have no recollection of your firm reminder to not do it.

There. I said it. I’m the bad guy.

But so be it. Because all of the “good guys” are the ones who are turning out to be grandparents by age 40. And I’ll be damned if my 13 year old daughter gets knocked up and I have to start parenthood all over again.

I know. You’re thinking I’m a total tree-hugging, free love-supporting, feminazi. “Poor thing. Her parents must have dropped her on her head in their patchouli garden.”

Negative.

I grew up a strict southern Assembly of God family. If Christian denominations were houses, Assembly of God and Pentecostal would be pretty tight neighbors. Like, they’d celebrate holidays together and have big happy freaking gatherings with each other at least once a week. Get the picture? It was strict in my house. The bible was the law for my mother, which meant we were in service every Wednesday night, Sunday morning, and Sunday night.  

But it doesn’t take a doomed sinner to realize that kids are going to have sex.

My mother put me on the pill when I was in high school. Sweet Jesus, that thing was magical! It stopped my cramps. It cleared up my acne. I felt great! I could look PMS in the face and say, “Come at me, bro!”

She didn’t bat an eye about the decision to put me on the pill. She didn’t lose any sleep. She didn’t interrogate me at dinner to see if I was whoring around. She didn’t lose faith that I was still the same kind of nerdy 15 year old girl who had a lot going for her.

Her logic was simple. “This pill will help you out a lot. Take it every day. I hope it doesn’t encourage you to go out and start doing it, but if you do, I don’t want you to live with the consequences.”

The end. Nothing awkward. Since then I’ve jumped from contraceptive to contraceptive until I found the one that works for me. All together, I would say I’ve been on some form of birth control for going on five and a half years. And I can honestly say I’m so proud of my mother for being a parent and taking initiative to protect her daughter.

Because the other ugly truth is that as much as we hope they won’t, kids mess up. I’m no exception. We fall in love with the wrong person. We give them our hearts, our time, our everything. We sleep with them because it feels like the right thing to do. And no matter who tells us don’t, we’ll never understand it until they break our hearts.

And then we crumble. We mourn for the loss of the piece of ourselves we’ll never get back. We mourn because we won’t be able to give that to the person who will treat us right. But for the lucky few of us who had smart, understanding parents, we can look forward to meeting that person, because we have nothing that permanently holds us to Mr. Wrong. We get to move on with our lives, trading in our bruises and scars for wisdom we wouldn’t have gotten any other way. We learn.

I will be damned if my daughter, who I will carry for 9 months and know better than anyone else, will permanently suffer the consequences of dating the wrong guy. I’ll be damned if I see her get stuck in the relationship that I was fortunate enough to get out of.

What my mother did for me was an act of love. It was a chance at life. It was a guarantee that nothing would get in my way of college, a career, and the pursuit of happiness. I hope I can one day be half the mother to my daughters that my mother was to me.

Love always, Tiffany.