I spent a lot of my first year with my daughter explaining to her that no, she was never going to have a dad.
“But why do you kiss Claudia like that and not me?” she would ask.
“I kiss Claudia like I would kiss a dad if you had one,” I would say.
“But why can’t I have a dad?” she would whine.
“Because I am a lesbian. That means I love other women, not men. And that’s okay. Families can look all different ways.”
This would inevitably bring on a pout.
“Look,” I would say, “you can have a Claudia even if you can’t have a dad. If you had a dad you wouldn’t have a Claudia.”
This always seemed to cheer her up. Claudia was way more fun than I was and always came up with cool projects for her to do when all I had the energy to do was drop her off in the childcare room at the grocery store. And after about a year she had settled into a secure attachment to both of us, and the dad question stopped coming up.
Things got a little stickier a couple of years later. I was tucking her into bed when I got the dreaded question: “Mommy, let’s talk about the sex.”
Errr. Think age-appropriate. “What do you want to know about sex?”
“How do you do the sex?”
I didn’t know six-year-olds asked this question!
None of my lesbian parenting books had prepared me to answer this. I considered the fallback position–what had I learned as a kid? The sex talk with my own mother had gone something like this: “Sex is intercourse. Intercourse makes babies. Women don’t much like it. Don’t do it until you’re married. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
Okay, scratch that. I wished I could retreat to a technical description of intercourse, as my mother had done, but clearly sex is way more than that. I was stumped. She looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t give a hetero-centrist sex talk here. But what to say?
Eons ticked by.
Finally I had an epiphany. “Well sweetie,” I said, “sex is when people who love each other touch each other in the places their underwear covers.”
I was so busy congratulating myself on this bit of genius that I wasn’t prepared for her next question.
“But Mommy, do you and Claudia do the sex?”
Oy.
I would love to hear how others have dealt with these sticky questions. Have your kids asked you about “the sex” yet? What did you say?
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