By CHERIE MCKAY
The correct terms these days for sex education is Knowing and Growing (KnG). Sure, the school can give my son a diagram of a woman’s vagina and ask him to label the labia and clitoris but they can’t actually call his class ‘sex education’.
Last year in Grade Six, Number One Son (aged 13) attended KnG classes. You can imagine his delight when, once a week after school he would tell me about the stuff he’d learned. I’ll never forget the moment he pulled out THAT diagram and proceeded to tell me that the clitoris has the same number of nerve endings… yada, yada, yada.
Recently, I went through the whole KnG saga again with Number Two Son.
I was in my bedroom folding washing when the boys came home from school on the last day of Term Three. Number Two Son wasn’t as keen as his big brother was to discuss the finer points of KnG and explained that today’s topic was contraception (the irony given the spacing between these two boys).
Awkwardly, he started to tell me about how the teacher of KnG rolled a condom onto a banana and Number One Son started to reminisce about when he saw that spectacle last year! Lost in the chaos, I recalled a friend telling me that he made sure his teenage boys always had access to condoms. Suddenly, my mouth spoke words I thought I’d never say (and would regret).
“There is a packed of condoms in my bedside table”.
I bought them several months ago in a moment of sheer liberation. Thoughtfully, I chose the ‘Ansell Lifestyles Large’ (I have a thing for black men and thought I should be prepared). I hid them in the red Coles basket under a loaf of wholemeal bread and strutted proudly to the check out. The young girl at the checkout didn’t bat an eyelid that this old bat was buying LARGE condoms, but she must have been a bit of a joker because she actually packed the condoms with the cucumber I purchased.