A Conversation With My 11 Year Old Daughter About Sex
This isn't in any of the parenting manuals
We were walking back home from the commissary on the military base where we live when my daughter said, “how can you not know when my inception date is?” I laughed and said, “because I didn’t just have sex 1 time in order to get pregnant with you, kiddo. I had sex many times. In fact around the time that you were conceived, I was having a lot of sex, so it’s kind of hard to say which one of those times was the time that made you”
This conversation didn’t entirely come out of nowhere. We were talking about my daughter’s favorite middle grade book series, Keeper of the Lost Cities. None of her friends have read the books, which rival Harry Potter books in both word and page count, but she tore through the first 8 books in about 2 weeks last summer. I offered to read them, too, so that she’d have someone to talk to about her favorite characters and plot theories.
The main character in these books is an elf named Sophie, who was raised by humans and is just discovering a world full of elves, goblins, ogres, trolls, and gnomes that she didn’t know existed. She was also genetically engineered to bring balance to this world, but that’s a much longer story.
One of the features of elves is that their age is determined by their date of inception (aka conception). Either elves don’t have a lot of sex (which is a shame) or they can just intuitively feel the instant they become pregnant (sure they do), but apparently all elves know the exact inception date of their children.
Anyway, that’s where this conversation started. I made an offhand comment about the fact that she wasn’t quite 11 yet since her actual birthday was 1 week away and as humans, we don’t go by inception date.
By the time I got through admitting that I was actually having so much sex when I got pregnant with her that I couldn’t possibly guess the exact day I conceived her, she was wrinkling her nose and shaking her head. Possibly in the hopes that she could reverse time and go back to before we started having this conversation.
But then she looked at me and asked, “really? That much?”
And I could have stopped it there, but I am just not that kind of mom.
So instead I said, “There were some days during that time that I was having sex 3 times in a day!”
Her reaction was a cross between horror and incredulity when she said, “Mom, TMI!”
Thinking I’d finally gone way too far, I said “I’m sorry, I’ll stop.” There were a few moments of silence before she said, “no it’s ok.”
And then our conversation went a direction I didn’t expect.
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