another eye opens

PARENTAL GUIDANCE

When I was a teenager, in the late 1970s, part of my mother’s ongoing plan to keep our relationship in a state of maximum anxiety included sneaking up on me and then delivering some report on the nature of human sexuality. I’d be shampooing the dog or pouring glass beads into a groovy Makeit & Bakeit window ornament, and all of a sudden—from right behind my shoulder, and in the same conversational, non-insane tone of voice in which a normal person might have asked, “Do you want me to get the flea dip?”—she would announce, “Never marry a man because you want to have sex with him. Just have sex with him.”

If she had attempted to pull out one of my molars with a pair of pliers, I could not have greeted these advances with more hostility and undisguised horror. The dog would bound out of the sink or the beads would spill, I’d say something wounding to my mother, she would sigh, and an hour or two later, she’d track me down and look out the window in a vague, troubled way, and then let me have it, really show me how it felt to have such a rude and ungrateful daughter:

“I thought I’d make stir-fry tonight,” she’d say. “In the wok.”

I’d hand it right back to her, let her know exactly how frightened and confused I was about sex and how furious I was that she hadn’t found a way to talk to me that wasn’t so uncomfortable and incomprehensible:

“Okay.”

— Caitlin Flanagan, “Love, Actually,” The Atlantic