Chapter 20: Another Step Forward

One thing nags me even after all these years, and writing this memoir brings it all back: did we somehow rob our daughter of her childhood by our actions? I know that it's a silly fantasy of many parents, many of them in positions of influence, sadly, that if they don't say anything about sex their kids won't learn about it, won't experiment, won't hurt themselves, and won't get pregnant or diseased or raped or whatever.

This is a little bit of a rant, but bear with me. Or, heck, skip a few paragraphs if you like. It'll be OK, really.

We all know that isn't true, that kids are going to learn about sex one way or another, that even if they heard absolutely nothing about it from their parents or teachers: the changes in their bodies, hormones, finding out what feels good by playing with themselves, all of this means that sooner or later, but inevitably for every last one of them, they are going to discover how to make themselves feel good. For at least some of them, those that find willing and curious partners, they're going to find out how to make someone else feel good, too.

The other thing, and this is what I think underlies so much of the drama about sex education and movies and what can you show and what can't you show and all that, blah blah blah, is the coarseness of contemporary society, the sexualization of almost everything. Not only in dress and movies, but in ideas and songs and, so much so overall, advertising. These media aren't teaching love or caring or commitment, they're teaching the pleasures of the moment. So the pendulum has swung from Puritan denial, good old Christian "Better to marry than to burn" stuff to total hedonism. I understand that, I really do. We're bombarded with sexual messages 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

OK, so we start from the premise that we as parents and adults need to get as far in front of this curve as we can. We want our kids to understand the context, to appreciate how much fun sex is, how much pleasure their bodies can give them, how much pleasure their bodies can give to someone else, and how rewarding it can be to make someone else feel good.

We want to teach about the consequences of carelessness: pregnancy, disease, getting oneself into a situation one can't control, ending up abused and hurt physically and emotionally. It's all about caring and the Golden Rule, really, it's almost that simple. Actually, it is that simple. Yes, there are grey areas as there are in everything, but the basic approach in matters sexual is pretty much the same as in sharing toys and playing and working together and pitching in and being part of a household and all that.

I know I'm on a soapbox here, and I also know I might be sounding like I'm protesting too much, and I'm trying to avoid that, perhaps not entirely successfully. That won't stop me, though.

I'm also convinced that there's no need for family orgies and there's no need necessarily for family nudity, even if our bodies are nothing to hide. Here, too, it's all a matter of context. We close the bathroom door because it's not really esthetic to watch someone else have a bowel movement, thank you very much. There are things we do in private, like those functions. There are others, like masturbation, that we do in private in the beginning, at least until we learn whether whoever we're with is amenable to watching or even participating. But we start out with the idea that it's private, and go from there. Of course, there's also the question of scratching where it itches. Often that's something we should be doing in private as well.

That said, while perhaps you shouldn't go at each other in front of your kids right off the bat, after all, sex starts out being a private thing and probably should stay that way, at least when the kids are around, you don't have to suspend your sex life or pretend it doesn't exist. Kids know that, anyway. I don't know how long it took our kids to realize that something was going on behind our closed bedroom door and most Saturday and Sunday and holiday mornings, and we certainly never told them right out loud, but they must have known something as they got older.

We also discovered later on that Julie could hear us. I don't think we realized how loud we were. At least, how loud my spouse was. She had a habit of letting the world know exactly what she was feeling, a practice that turned me on no end and made me ram her harder and faster the more she talked. But I digress.

No, what I'm thinking about here is the idea that hearing laughter coming from the parents' bedroom probably doesn't do the kid any harm. In fact, it's probably something really positive. That it might be accompanied or preceded or followed by grunts and groans and cries and squeaking bedsprings is a bonus, not to be sneezed at or refused in any way. We figured that was good.

This story really isn't about our older son, Matt, mostly because he didn't display the interest in us that his sister has done. No wonder, considering that the kid probably had half the women in his life hoping he would spread them. And by women, I mean not only the girls in his classes but, in many cases, their mothers, too. How many of them he ended up having we never knew for sure, but it was a lot.

We're going to claim a little credit here. I know parents aren't really supposed to do that: after all, beyond a certain point the kid is responsible for his own actions and must take the credit or the blame for them, but I want to think, and I've got some basis for this, that Lee and I succeeded in teaching him to respect others, to be kind whenever possible, to stand up for himself, and not hesitate to fight when he had to. That last item is a tough one, I know that, but sometimes there's no way to avoid it, and he needed to learn that, too.

No, as far as we knew there were no little Matts running around, no woman who ever complained that he took advantage of her, no disease, again, as far as we know, but the smiles and even smug looks that he seemed to inspire among women wherever he went suggested that he had spread his charms far and wide, and that he had spread more than his share of thighs, too.

I should add that as far as we know there were no angry husbands or boyfriends following him around, either. I don't know whether that was because he was super discreet, or his partners were, or whether that everyone, including those other men, liked him too much to do anything about it.

At any rate, this was some kid. All I'm trying to say with this is that he put his energies outside the home and was well rewarded for it. Was my spouse ever interested? I don't know. Probably, she was, but since Matt never seemed very open to those possibilities, nothing ever came of it.

So we return to Julie. One theme of my life, and our marriage, has been watching. We both like to watch, and we like being watched. We like our privacy, and overall we'd rather be just ourselves alone, but we've met any number of couples and singles who've proved attractive enough and interested enough that we've let them into our lives and into our bodies. And vice versa.

My point is this: I was watching, literally watching, Julie in a way that I hadn't been watching Matt. Because she was a girl, because I like watching. What bothers me is whether my watching, or my spouse watching, and being receptive, somehow robbed her of her innocence, or pushed her along faster than she might have gone by herself.

On balance, I don't think so. We created opportunities, that's what we did, and we let things take their course. There was no guarantee that Julie would respond, of course, and in the end it kind of took longer than we expected, but we'd decided early on that we would create conditions and let her decide what and how and when she wanted to respond to them.

Some of these conditions or experiences I've described. We never ripped our clothes off in front of her and went at it, but more than once we weren't quite as careful as we might have been in closing our door, or closing our curtains, or whatever.

I've said before that we've always been kind of casual about nudity in our house, but we aren't nudists, or naturists, as they prefer to be called, and we did not regularly skinny-dip with Julie or anyone else. At least we haven't yet. On the other hand, we've often gone in the pool, my spouse and I, when Julie wasn't around. Or, I admit, sometimes when she wasn't around but we expected she might be back early. Or, who knows?

By now we were on the verge of something, it wasn't clear exactly what, but we were at a tipping point or a fork in the road or whatever little metaphor or simile you might want to dream up. I felt like a movie director. My actors were assembled but the script wasn't quite finished.

One thing was paramount. Lee, my spouse, had articulated it perfectly: Let her lead. "Her" being Julie, of course. This was fine in principle, I mean that, and I wasn't trying to change it, but I felt like a kid on his first trip to Disneyland. I could see it up in the distance, and the Matterhorn over everything, and I could see the entrance and the Disney train down the long parking row, but it was still a bit of a hike to get there.

Another aspect of this was twofold. Well, threefold, in fact. First, Julie, we've talked about her. Second, Stephanie. Most of the same rules applied, that is, we needed to let her decide her pace, but the big difference between her and Julie is that Stephanie wasn't our daughter. Not only that, but she was no longer a little girl. True, they weren't 18 years old yet and thus legally adults, but they were 17, a pretty mature 17 if I was any judge, so the difference was not significant, in my view. Yes, we still had responsibilities as hosts and the adults among non-adults, but both lines were getting thinner by the day. Maybe even by the hour.

It mattered because Stephanie was sending clear signals that she was interested in me. Was I a challenge? Probably. Maybe even sort of a trophy on her belt. After all, she had high school boys wrapped around her little finger and she knew it. Mark was putty in her hands. I was pretty sure that was the way he ended up, at any rate, even if he started out rather stiff in her hands. No, I was a little tougher of a challenge, but I was probably telegraphing that I wasn't too hard to get. I just needed to make sure that Lee was on board with anything Stephanie proposed, and I was pretty sure she would be.

Third and last, there was the question of Stephanie's mother, Mary. There the situation was a little more complicated, but probably not all that difficult. We'd had a little enjoyable encounter with her and Stephanie's father, Jeff, but then Mary had told us that Jeff liked hearing about anything she'd done but didn't really want to be a part of it. That sounded weird to me, but I wasn't going to worry about it. More for me, that's what I was thinking.

The problem with this was obvious: I'm one guy, and despite my studliness, I am thus limited in how satisfying I could be at one time to two women, much less three. And I haven't even counted Julie in that equation yet. So the question was going to be how or whether to introduce another male into this little caper. What I was wondering is whether Mark, Stephanie's current squeeze, was a candidate. In a rather surprising way, I found out that he was. I also found out a few things I hadn't known about Stephanie and her mother.

All that brings me to the morning following the mini pizza and pool party Julie and Stephanie and William and Mark had had at our house. Julie, following Steph upstairs when we were all heading for bed, had asked us whether we liked what we'd seen. My spouse and I had looked at each other, a little dumbfounded. Apparently we'd been observed. We saw it as an opportunity rather than a setback.