Back to Table of Contents

Joyce Maynard
The Girlfriend Sleeps Over

I still remember the shame I experienced when my breasts began developing and the embarrassment I felt at the prospect of asking my mother for my first bra. I put it off for half a year--months in which I raced to the girls’ locker room as fast as I could on gym days so I could secure a bathroom stall to change in. I couldn’t bear for the other girls to see my undershirt.

A year later, at fourteen, when I got my period, I was once again struck dumb by the prospect of telling my mother, and so I pedaled my bike to the drugstore and filled my shopping basket with a bunch of unnecessary sundries, all to mask the real purpose of my mission: buying sanitary napkins. Taking out my money to pay, I cringed at the thought of the cashier imagining me menstruating. I would always choose a woman for my cashier. It was still bad enough.

Given the level of shame I felt over everything to do with my body and sex, it is a source of some amazement that I got to the point, only nine years later, of conceiving and bearing a child of my own. One thing I knew when the day came that I had a daughter myself (and then two sons): I wanted my children to grow up with a very different attitude toward their sexuality than what I’d known as a kid. I was going to raise children who wouldn’t feel, as I did, that there was something shameful about their bodies. My children would be able to ask questions about sex, and when they did, they’d get straight answers. …

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers
Copyright 2005 by Joyce Maynard