Sex and Santa Claus

I’ll never forget the moment I found out there was no Santa Claus.  I was in my parent’s bedroom rummaging through my mom’s dresser drawer.  It was a drawer filled with interesting things and I have a vague recollection of sifting through it like a treasure chest on more than one occasion.  On this day though, I stumbled upon something that I wished I could erase from my memory. I had found my baby teeth. My baby teeth that the ‘supposed’ tooth fairy had collected from under my pillow and taken to Tooth Fairy land.

My sophisticated nine year old brain went into overdrive. I was processing it all too fast. If there was no Tooth Fairy then - I came to the only logical yet sad conclusion - there was no Santa.  I was devastated. The magic of my childhood was officially over.  Why did I have to be in that stupid drawer? Why weren’t my teeth better hidden? But really, I was nine and it was only a matter of time before these truths revealed themselves in one way or another.  My son is eight and I hope to hold on to as least one, if not two more Christmases where he still believes.  I want to protect his innocence and allow him to hold on to the magic just a little while longer. 

Over dinner with friends the other night, the topic of what we tell our children and when, came up. One friend was telling the group how, on a lengthy trip to their cottage when she was twelve, her father started asking her questions about what she knew about sex the minute they pulled out of the driveway. She said it made for an extremely long and awkward trip.  In the next breath, she told us that she and her husband have already had the ‘sex talk’ with two of their girls, who were five and seven at the time.

I wasn’t exactly sure what having the sex talk meant to her.  Well, it meant answering the girl’s questions about how she became pregnant which involved, “Daddy putting his penis into Mommy’s vagina.”  What??? You told them that??? I was actually speechless and I teach over a hundred hormonally charged girls, sexual education every year. I needed to digest this. We had only ever told our kids that a baby came when two people really loved each other.  Were her kids ready for that kind of information?  Were mine ready for more?  Her children are armed with information that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with mine knowing…yet. Just like the kid at school who already knows there is no Santa –how long will it be until they spill the beans to everyone?

My parents never talked to me about sex, nor would I have wanted them to. But, maybe that’s because we didn’t have ‘open’ conversations about things like that and maybe that’s the kind of atmosphere I’m now subconsciously creating for my own kids. I don’t know. It’s up to each of us to decide when our kids are ready for certain pieces of information. Or, maybe, it’s really about when we’re ready to deal with telling them those certain pieces of information.

Nothing terrified me more as a kid than the thought of my parents having sex (except maybe them getting a divorce).  I don’t want to terrorize my children but I also don’t want them being the only kids in school who think babies are made magically by love. Actually, I think I’m fine with the kid who knows about Santa spilling the beans to my kids because it saves me from having to do it. And, while they’re at it, they might as well tell them where babies really come from.