“I know how babies are made.”
That’s the bomb seven-year-old me dropped on a casual Tuesday to my wide-eyed mother in the kitchen. It marked the first time the topic of sex was raised between us and reflected the way conversations about anything sexual would pan out with my parents for years to come. I’d throw out a statement, test the waters and instead of a splash, the water retreated.
Earlier that day at school, all the grade 2 classes were ushered into the music portable for a “special presentation,” so special that some parents signed a form forbidding their kids’ attendance. Intrigued, I sat criss-cross applesauce in the front row, eagerly awaiting the smiling presenter to reveal top secret information. Maybe she was an undercover agent enlisting our help.
Instead, she pulled out a pop-up book.
I was a smart kid. I read above grade level and teachers called me a pleasure to have in class. But as the lady flipped through pages and talked about body parts in a cheery voice, my forehead furrowed deeper and deeper. And while normally I believe that society underestimates children’s intelligence, they might have jumped the gun trying to explain the exact mechanics of sex to a seven-year-old.
Here’s how I understood it: a man and woman take off all their clothes, stand facing each other and inch closer together until his penis brushes her pelvis.
Bam. Sex.
I left the music portable, perplexed. This misconception of how babies were made stayed with me for years afterwards. My parents didn’t catch it because they never followed up on my declaration.
Most kids would be relieved their parents didn’t discuss sex-related things. My brain — my sweet, stupid brain whose number one skill is self-sabotage — took it as an insult.
Growing up, over the clinks of chopsticks at dinner, I’d look at my parents — my dad with his narrow shoulders and sharp chin, my mom with her voluminous hair pinned back, both Korean immigrants — and wonder if they loved each other.
As a kid, you’re told that the root of marriage is true love and couples live happily ever after. But on TV, I watched Western parents smile and kiss while their kids yelled, “Gross!” and knew that scene would never play out in my household. There was genuine care between my parents and the connection of two people bound by 20 years of marriage and one know-it-all daughter. But I still heard half-jokes about divorce more often than I saw physical affection.
Korean parents can be like that.
This is all to say that I never associated my parents with the passionate, flaming, hot-and-heavy love that I equated with early perceptions of sex — the kind of love I wanted to find. It cemented a belief that they weren’t the right people to get romance education from.
Still, something about my parents’ avoidance of the awkward “talk” was bothersome. I viewed the willingness to educate somebody as an acknowledgement of their maturity and capacity to understand complex topics. When my parents brushed away my questions about physical intimacy, I felt diminished.
So I became responsible for my own sex ed. I whipped open Google Docs and took notes on some interesting YouTube searches. I read a shit ton of romance novels, and while they aren’t known for being realistic, it’s where I lost that transactional idea of sex from the music portable and first understood it as something desirable. I escalated from reading about cute kisses in Percy Jackson to full-blown, hold-your-horses sex scenes in — actually, that’s too exposing. Let’s just say there are a lot of trashy romance books out there.
My own educational pursuits made me blush, but normalized the idea of sex. It was empowering to understand what sex was and remove the taboo attitude around it. I stopped viewing it as something awkward to discuss.
But this education flew under the radar of my parents, who never realized just how normal I found it.
It’s no secret that my Korean immigrant father is more conservative than his young Westernized daughter, particularly regarding relationships — a hard-won truth from years of fierce tears and blood-boiling arguments. Sometimes I poke the bear and prod him with questions. Once, I asked him what he thought was an appropriate age for a couple to go on a romantic one-night trip together.
He refused to answer. He kept saying that “it depends” and I kept saying that of course it depends, but he must have an approximate age range, no? High school — probably not. University — maybe? Mid-twenties?
My dad snapped that he was uncomfortable talking about this with me, ending the conversation. Later, my mom told me it was because an overnight couples’ trip implied sex.
I was pissed. He treated me like a child, which deep down, was exactly what I was trying to reverse. I’d known my questions would make him uncomfortable and was pushing him to face the fact that I was a grown enough woman to have proper discussions about relationships. After years of being seated at the kids table, I wanted to stab my knife deep into the adult table to prove I belonged there.
Even at age seven, declaring that I knew how babies were made had been a strategic move. I’d wanted to see the surprise on my mom’s face. I’d wanted her to realize that I knew more than what my parents gave me credit for.
In case I’ve misled you, let me get this straight: I have a great relationship with my parents. But conversations about sex and romance are tricky. We use different languages, one developed from Western society and media, the other from late 1900s Korean culture. (We also, quite literally, could not have a physiological discussion about sex in the same language. My Korean and their English doesn’t go that far.)
It’s not always that I know more than what my parents expect — I just know differently than what they expect.
These clashing expectations, combined with protectiveness of their only daughter and the inevitable dose of awkwardness, mean that sometimes I’m on my own more than I’d like to be when figuring life out. But sometimes there’s no point testing the waters when you’re diving into the deep end anyway.
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