Navigating the Treacherous Waters of Sex Ed in Middle School

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“Hello, this is Mrs. So and So, your daughter’s science teacher? We need your permission for her to take home a baby.”
“A baby?”
“We sent home a permission slip but your daughter never turned it in.”
“A baby?”
“So does she have your permission?”

A frantic call from my daughter earlier that afternoon alerted me to there being something important either she had forgotten, or worse, I had forgotten, that now needed to be hastily fixed. I was pretending not to know what the “baby” was but I did know. It was a futile experiment to wart off teen pregnancy in middle school kids. What with all of the raging hormones, pop songs, sex-soaked billboard ads, and Viagra ads (“erections lasting more than four hours”) the school district was spending some of its money trying to do the jobs parents should be doing as in, “if you turn up pregnant at 14 I’ll rip your hair out.” Just kidding. Maybe not so severely but with the same end-result. Are parents doing their job? Apparently not very well. Add to that, the allure of all that attention they get, all of the TLC pregnant women get, and that TV show 16 and Pregnant. To say nothing of Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin.

“Teenagers shouldn’t be having babies,” I told my daughter and her cousin at the mall the other day. “They should just go have abortions like sensible people do.” Okay, maybe I said it and maybe I didn’t, but the point is that no one really has abortions anymore. There is a race war on, haven’t you heard? Hispanics are taking over the planet. White people better start having babies, many of them, and fast.

It’s possible I have become hysterical and am imagining things. Either way, I knew my daughter wanted to do “the baby thing,” because it was just too weird to pass up. Who wouldn’t want to try taking home a doll-baby that cried on a timer, that you had to feed, and rock, and change its diaper, and burp it? It came with a little blanket and clothes!

I first set eyes on the thing when I went to pick her up at a friend’s house. All of these 13 year-olds had babies to tend to. Really, I felt like I’d flown to Utah and was visiting a plural marriage home in the FLDS. They were frantically throwing their babies around, rocking them violently back and forth and when the baby finally got quiet because they’d done something right, they would simply prop it up on a chair as one would do to a doll or a half-read novel. Of course, I did not hesitate to tell them, any time you set a baby down like that they’re going to fall right over onto the tops of their egg shell heads!

By the annoyed looks flicked back at me by them I figured they wanted us moms to stop clucking about. We couldn’t help it, though. As soon as one of the babies started wailing it thrust us backwards in time, to the dark ages of panic — where you’re up in the middle of the night and all you want to do is make the baby stop crying. Not in a way that would put you on the nightly news, of course, but in the normal, motherly way. You know, feed it, rock it, burp it. All of these reactions, by the way, are recorded in the thing. This is how the student is graded. Can they react properly to a crying baby? Wait, is the point of it to TEACH them how to be mothers at 13 or is the point of it to annoy them so much they want to put off being mothers as long as possible.

It’s hard to know. But from the reports my daughter gives me about sex ed in public schools the only time she’s seen an actual penis, apparently, was “in a cartoon” drawing of one (egads) or one riddles with sores. They also saw a video of childbirth. They are doing what they can, I figure, to deter the tweens from their predestined roles as young mothers. Good luck with that. Nature has a way of shoving all of the particulars on the backburner when we’re talking about LOVE and SEX.

But maybe, just maybe, they’ve freaked my daughter out enough that she’ll stay a virgin until she’s at least 25. You know, why is it the business of public schools to teach kids about sex and pregnancy and all of that? Are parents really that out of it that they don’t fill their kids in on this stuff?

Either way, by the time four AM rolled around, that baby started wailing and there was my poor Emma rocking it, feeding it, shaking it (no, she didn’t shake it) as it wailed and howled into the night, sending adults within hearing distance to stir awake and wonder what the fuck was going on in our apartment. Emma started to whine to her mom, “oh god, I can’t do this. It’s broken! It’s broken!” She’d been complaining that the baby was broken because it wouldn’t stop crying. “It’s not broken,” I reassured her. Just keep rocking it.

About fifteen minutes of solid wailing later, to the point where I almost whipped out a breast and started feeding the thing (no, I didn’t), it finally silenced itself.

In the morning, my poor daughter said as she carried the quiet baby out into the living room as if she were carrying a too-full glass of water, careful not to spill a drop, “I’m not having a baby until I’m at least 30.”

In the end, she was given an “F” for the assignment. Apparently her friends had been throwing the baby on the floor to make it stop crying because, they said, it was “broken.” Yeehaw.

You know, it isn’t even really that good of an indicator of what it’s like to have a newborn. Not in the good ways and not in the bad ways. But I think it did sort of put the idea in my daughter’s head of the kind of responsibility it entails. Not that she is ever going to end up a teen mom. I love kids, I love babies — I wish her nothing but happiness and I know she’ll be a great mom. Just not at 13. Or 16. Or even 18.

This is the part where I say I am a single, unmarried mother who went into it with no shame. But I don’t wish that on my daughter. I don’t know what it is like to have a man around to help raise a child. I’m sure there is nothing better than that, even if they want to sleep through the whole thing. Even if the marriage doesn’t last. There isn’t really a way for schools to teach that part of mothering – so they do what they think they can get away with. Preventing teen pregnancy, they feel, is a good place to start. Oh, my friends, if life were only that simple.

 

 

 




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