The Awkward Discussion

When I was a kid, my dad decided to have the sex talk with me at a crowded steak and egg place on a Sunday morning. Well he didn’t exactly decide…my mom made him do it. She’d been bugging him for years to talk to me about the birds and bees but he’d been putting it off because he wasn’t the type of guy to talk about sex with his son or anybody! My dad was not communicative at all.

He’d come home from work, read the paper, watch some T.V. and go to bed. If he took me to a ballgame he’d buy me a hotdog, cheer on the home team, ask me if I was having a good time and maybe buy some peanuts although they made him choke. The man was not a talker. So the thought of having the sex talk with me must have been tortuous for him. So there we were, over omelets and biscuits with gravy when he looked at me and said, “Don’t get a girl pregnant.” I looked up from my eggs and said, “Okay”, and that was it. It was over. We’d had the talk!

Now it was my turn. My son was getting older and my wife was insistent that it was time to discuss sex AND drugs with the boy. I was pretty sure that junior had many opportunities to find out anything he needed to know about sex from his friends and the internet so I had to figure out what message I needed to send him. He’d also mentioned to me that one of his friends was caught with some “pot” but he assured me that he’d never tried any. Well I was determined to have a better talk with my son than the succinct one my dad had with me but what exactly should I say that would influence an impressionable young man.

I asked some friends what they told their kids and found out that most avoided the discussion completely or simply asked their kids to tell them what they knew and left it at that. So I was on my own. I searched the internet for info and then I hit on the idea of a combo sex/drug talk. I took my son out for breakfast (to honor my dad) and asked him if he wanted to talk about what men and women do behind closed doors, or in a car or sometimes in a …he turned bright red and immediately shushed me. So I figured I’d better make it quick. I told him that I saw a study that said men who smoke pot daily had a hard time reaching orgasm. He choked on his hash browns and shushed me again. I told him another study said some smokers experience premature ejaculation and I blurted out that he was too young to be a dad and that condoms don’t always work! He looked at me like he was going to pass out. So I guess that was it. I had the talk with my son and it covered both sex and drugs in a weird and disjointed way. Maybe I had scared him a bit about the evils of marijuana and just possibly our little talk would make him think twice before he got naked with a girl.

The one thing I didn’t mention to my little man was that the report on sex and pot smoking I’d quoted from also said that men who got high generally had more sexual partners than guys who didn’t. I didn’t feel that part of the research was something he needed to know…EVER!