Recently, I had the sex talk with my ten-year-old daughter. Well, not THE sex talk, but A sex talk.

It all started with a comment she made to me as we were driving home from school one afternoon.

“Mommy, my friend told me that one of the boys in the class said a couple of bad words to her.”

I don’t remember what the one word was (it wasn’t anything I considered to be terrible; they go to a private Christian school — the offense bar is set pretty low), but I know she said that one of the words was “sex.”

Now, why the boy was saying that word to that girl is a mystery. I don’t know if it was said in its correct context or not. Maybe he was just trying to shock her.

But it gave me the opportunity to talk to my older daughter (who is getting some hair “down there” already) about something that’s going to be important for her to think about and understand the truth about very, very soon.

The first thing I started with was:

Sex is not a bad word.

Evangelical Christians and the demonization of sex

There are many, many things I love about my church. And there are many things I’m grateful for concerning my evangelical Christian upbringing. The puritanical viewpoint toward sex is not one of them.

During my formative years, I was told many times to not have sex before I was married. Nobody really said WHY. They just said, “Don’t do it.”

I learned this message (and so did my husband, who grew up in a similar culture):

Sex is bad; sex is dirty — save it for the one you love and marry.

Nobody ever explained WHY we were supposed to wait and share something so terrible with the person we were supposed to love with all our hearts and spend the rest of our lives with.

And then I was raped when I was 17

It was something I didn’t want, but I let it happen anyway. Sometimes you start feeling like you don’t have any other choice.

I said “no.” I tried to push him away.

I gave up when none of that worked.

I started feeling that sex WAS really bad and dirty. I felt dirty. I felt like a liar. All my promises to God to stay a virgin until I was married had been thrown out the window.

And I still didn’t understand why we were supposed to want to save something so terrifying and dehumanizing for the one person who was supposed to be more special to us than anyone else in the world.

I didn’t feel special.

A long string of intensely awful sexual relationships after that didn’t help any.

But then I met my husband

I started dating the man I would marry when I was 27. We knew we were committed to loving and spending our lives with each other one month later. We had sex (the best sex I’d ever had in my life; I finally learned how truly fun and amazing sex could be) for the first time 9 months after that. Then, we got married two years and four months after that.

My husband was a virgin when he met me. He gave himself to me before we were married because he wanted to show me how much he loved me. My fears and insecurities clouded my perceptions so that I couldn’t see the truth of what was right in front of me.

I’ve since forgiven myself for taking his virginity away from him. He never did blame me for “taking” it. He always asserted he was “giving” it, even though I always felt differently — probably because I had been raped. I didn’t want to rape someone else.

And God has shown me that I didn’t even hurt my husband’s purity standing before Him because I (his wife) am still the only person he’s ever had sex with…and it’s likely to always be that way.

I didn’t say all this to my daughter that afternoon

I didn’t go into any gory details. I didn’t go into all my tragic, messed-up sexual history.

I simply told her:

Sex is not a bad word. It is not a bad thing. It is something God created for mommies and daddies to do, preferably after they are married, so that they can show their love to each other and make babies.

The eight year old, who was also in the car at the time (another reason why I didn’t go into any gory details) said, “Is that like kissing?”

Me: “It’s a little more than kissing. A little deeper than that.”

The ten year old: “You mean, like what you and Daddy do when you’re naked in bed together?”

Oh, you’re catching on to that, huh? Great!

Me: “Um, yes. It’s exactly like that. But it’s not bad. It’s a beautiful thing. And that’s how I got you and your sister.”

I could hear the eye roll from the back seat.

Then, she said, “Well, my friend still thinks it’s a bad word.”