More than a mouthful

My body was developing, changing with the onset of puberty. I thought my breasts were too small – I wanted bigger breasts, and complained to my mother. She looked me in the eye and said “Anything more than a mouthful is a waste.” I stared at her, wide-eyed, and then burst into laughter. It was shocking (and delightful) to me, on many levels. In part, the surprise came from her reversal of the usual “bigger is better”; my mother, also a small-breasted woman, framed big breasts as excessive, “a waste.” A sentiment unfair to large-breasted women, to be sure, but I was comforted by the notion that smaller breasts might actually be superior. But the main reason this was shocking was that my mother was acknowledging my sexuality, in a specific and concrete way. The “mouthful” could have referred to breast-feeding an infant, but my mother’s delivery made it very clear that this was a sexual reference. While I had a sense that breasts could be attractive (or unattractive, as I saw my own), my mother’s statement placed them squarely in the context of partnered sexual activity. Not merely passive objects to stir men’s interest, these breasts were pleasuring and/or being pleasured, a novel idea for me at the time.

My mother was comfortable about sex. She had an earthy, raunchy sense of humor; she loved to wear t-shirts with double entendres, like the one from an oyster house that had “I Eat ‘Em Raw” on the front. I kept some of those t-shirts after she died and wore them with a sense of wicked enjoyment; I was sad when they finally fell apart. I can’t remember any specific conversations she had with me about puberty or sexuality, but I know that she encouraged me to come to her with any questions I had about sex, and she was generally frank and honest in her answers. This was certainly a step up from the sex education (and I use the term loosely here) I received in school. My fifth grade teacher refused to answer my questions about homosexuality. We were frightened by vague films about venereal disease in seventh grade, with pictures of syphilitic chancres but little real information. My ninth grade biology teacher was forbidden by law to discuss contraception. My mother had no such limits or rules, as far as I recall – I really could ask her anything, and there was no need for shame or embarrassment. The only problem was, I didn’t always know what to ask! I knew, though, when it came time for me to need birth control, I wouldn’t feel awkward about approaching my mother for help. When that time did finally arrive, though, my mother had already passed away and there was no one I felt comfortable approaching about the issue, leaving me to muddle through on my own.

To my mother, sex wasn’t shameful or something to be feared. I never got the sense from her that being sexual or having sexual desires was wrong or bad or dangerous. I remember kissing my boyfriend in the back of the car while my mother was driving him home, with no sense of embarrassment that she could see us in the rearview mirror. In fact, after we dropped him off, she and I talked about it; I remember my eager enthusiasm and her indulgent smile and gentle encouragement. Given this openness about sexuality at home, I never really understood the complex sexual taboos among my peers, and my directness on the topic earned me teasing and social isolation in middle school. But it’s this comfort with sexuality that makes me so good at teaching human sexuality to legions of college students. It’s just sex – no need to titter behind our hands or mumble while looking at the floor as we talk about it.

Where did my mother come by such a positive attitude about sex? She did come of age during the early 1960s, the so-called “sexual revolution.” With the publication of the Kinsey reports and the availability of the Pill (among other factors), public attitudes toward sex became increasingly liberal. My mother would undoubtably have been affected by these social changes. In addition, her father was a doctor and her mother a nurse, so they would have had greater knowledge about sexuality than the average person. My maternal grandparents tend to be rather pragmatic about matters of the body, and they probably conveyed this matter-of-fact attitude about puberty and sexuality to my mother. But even with the liberalization of sexual attitudes and her own family environment, my mother’s sex-positive stance strikes me as unusual. Americans continue to have complex, ambivalent attitudes about sex, particularly with regard to women’s sexuality. Many women continue to struggle with fears of being too sexual and lack the clear sense of sexual agency that my mother embodied so fully.

It is one thing to come to terms with your own sexuality; it is quite another to feel comfortable with your own daughter’s emergent sexuality. Even the most liberal-minded parents can have difficulty accepting the idea of their teenage child becoming sexually active. It is all-too-common for parents to convey this discomfort to adolescent girls, subtly (or not so subtly) signaling that she should not feel or be sexual. Her sexuality is to be deferred until adulthood, and then exists largely for her partner’s pleasure, not her own. Perhaps my mother did have moments of doubt or worry, but these were never evident to me. Her message to me was clear: Sex is normal and enjoyable, for both women and men. In other words, what my mother told me about sex was really more than a mouthful. Through education and example, she gave me the right to be sexual on my own terms. True, I struggled for some years to define what that meant to me as I waded through the contradictory messages about women’s sexuality from my peers and the media. But without the foundation she laid out for me, I don’t know if I would have ever found my way to my authentic sexuality.

In a culture that stigmatizes women’s sexuality and silences real sex education, I recognize how fortunate I was to be raised by a woman who refused to accept these ideologies. For my mother to truly embrace her own sexuality and see herself as entitled to sexual pleasure without shame or guilt is a rather remarkable achievement. That she was able to extend that same gift to her own daughter is even more astounding.


Nancy Driessel Stearns (date and location unknown)

Mothers

This week's essay has been contributed by guest blogger, Momsomniac. I'd like to extend my gratitude to her -- for contributing her memories of my mother and for being such a good friend.

As I thought about how to write this, I realized that much of what I had to say casts my own parents, particularly my mother, in a bad light. So I want to start by stating – emphatically – that my parents are not Bad People. They were barely more than children when they married. To my mind, my mother, who dropped out of high school at 17 to marry my father, was a child. They grew up in relatively traditional working class families, my mother with no small amount of abuse at the hands of her father. So all things considered, they did okay. And if they were unable to untangle the mixed messages they gave me and my sister – words in support of the modern notion that we could be anything we wanted to be and actions in support of the notion that women existed to please men - well, that doesn’t make them bad. It makes them human. So, in light of that ...

I have two stand-out specific memories of Nancy, and two more general ones that I only realize are a reflection of her parenting now that I am, myself, a parent.

All of these memories, as with so many memories, are memories of myself, but with Nancy in them. There are two reasons for this -

One is that I was a teen-ager, and like many teen-agers, as my world expanded with new feelings, thoughts, and desires, it also shrunk to my own line of sight.

The other is that, as Deb has stated earlier, Nancy was not a parent who was ‘ever-present.’ She certainly DID some parenting, as I recall, but she didn’t go out of her way to insert herself into the lives of her children or their friends. That, in a way, makes these first two stand-out memories more special.

The stand-outs:

1) When my parents’ marriage was falling apart, my mother, who had devoted more than half her life to waiting on my father, didn’t handle it well. I never knew what she’d do, or how she’d respond to things. One week-end, the group of us had been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) at Deb’s house and we had just wrapped up the game. As I had been instructed, I called my mother and asked her to come get me.

It was around 5 o’clock. She told me she’d be there at 6 and that I better be out front to meet her. I suppose I spent a little time hanging out with Deb, and then dutifully went out to meet her a little before 6. Six o’clock came and went. No Mom.

After a while, Nancy came out and tried to get me to go back inside. I wouldn’t. I don’t know if Nancy thought I was an unusually obedient child or if she understood I was afraid. In any event, after about another hour, she brought out 2 stools (buckets? chairs? [memory is unreliable]), and she sat outside with me until my mother showed up at 11 that night. I don’t recall if she stared at my mother or if she just turned and walked back inside. I do recall that she didn’t say a word. It felt ... good.

2) I went through puberty when I was in the 3rd Grade. By the time I finished 8th grade, I was tired of my peers trying to touch me and asking questions about my breasts. I was more tired of teachers holding me after class for no reason, or making comments about my body. So I did what any thoughtful pre-teen who felt out of control would do; I developed an eating disorder and lost 30 pounds (I don’t mean to be flip – I just don’t think people realize how much this can be about unwelcome sexual attention).

In any event, by the time we moved to Florida, I looked as if I had never seen puberty and didn’t have any hope of seeing puberty any time soon. This is when I met Deb and her family.

One of the boys in the D&D group “run” by Deb’s brother had insisted I be allowed to play after a conversation he and I had about books. And when I came to the house, Nancy then insisted that Deb be allowed to play. I recall being afraid that all this would cause me to be seen as an interloper, and eventually I was, but not before Deb and I became friends. This was important, because I had moved from a small town where I was well known and well-liked by my peers to a place where everything good about me was seen as a threat to the current order. I needed friends.

I was allowed to spend the night when these games were played solely because Deb existed. A sister to one of “those boys” made the house safe, in my mother’s eyes. Without Deb, I would not have had even this short stint of being a part of a group of friends. And often when I spent the night, I would wake up early and there would be no one awake except for me and Nancy.

I had gradually begun to gain my weight back and I appeared to be going through a very late puberty. And one of these mornings, Nancy tried to talk to me, to get me to talk to her, about how my body was changing. I was rather amused, because she couldn’t have been more wrong about what was happening to me. But on another level, I felt deeply moved that a friend’s mother would be concerned that no one had had this talk with me, and would try to take this on for herself.



General memories that I only realize NOW are about parenting:

1) There was one night I recall running (with the D&D group) all around Deb’s neighborhood, playing Frisbee on the tennis courts, and being chased by “police” because we were out after curfew (likely neighborhood patrol – there was no curfew where I lived a few miles away).

Nancy was no doubt at home, secure that we were pretty good kids and that a group of kids heading out with Frisbees on a beautiful night was nothing to worry about. This was probably normal for Deb and her brother. But I had never felt so free in all my life.

2) Deb and I would spend our nights devising skits, telling stories, and “experimenting” (let’s lie down and try to say the alphabet backwards while we rub our temples and see what happens). At the time, I thought Deb wanted to do these kinds of things because she was younger than me. But over time, I realized that this was just ... Deb.

See, at 13 there were already a LOT of messages in my life about how interested I was supposed to be in boys. These were often not positive messages, more along the lines of what I call the triangle of shame (girls only matter if boys say they do; all boys want is sex; sex is bad), but clearly I was supposed to be very interested. I wasn’t, but I thought I was supposed to be, so I tried. Except for when I hung out with Deb, when it didn’t matter.

She couldn’t have cared less about the boys sleeping in her brother’s room downstairs or what I thought of them. And though it’s clear that she had her own awakening and struggles later, I do suspect that the way she was mothered gave her the freedom to be herself at that time. And as an extension of that, as long as I was with her, I was also free to be myself - utterly indifferent to boys, fascinated by other things entirely, and all ...

So to sum it up, to my mind, Nancy in many ways gave me Deb, who has been my friend since I was about 14. And that was 30 years ago. Who would not be grateful for that?



Momsomniac (Florida, 1985)