I want to share how important it is to tell our children things by their real names. Especially when it comes to the definition of sex. You'll spare yourselves a lot of humiliating moments. And you'll spare your children a fair bit of wondering and confusion. I say this because I learnt it the hard way – from personal experience.
My parents were nudists – or rather, I should say they used to be nudists, because I clearly remember my first nudist beach, when I was three. I still remember the moment when I, aged three, discovered the main reason why my father was different from my mother and me. Not that my mother and I were all that alike either (back then grown-ups didn't yet wax their private parts), but even though they both looked to me like shaggy monstrous Yetis, somehow she seemed a tiny bit more acceptable than him. The strange thing is that of all the people on the nudist beach I remember only my parents; nobody else left a mark on my memory.
Also, a few years later they tried to convince me that sex was nothing to be ashamed of. I found out first-hand when I got up in the night to blow my nose and managed to stumble upon my parents doing exactly that. Except it looked pretty shameful, for both Mum and Dad. On my way back to my room I wondered which of the two of them I'd be more ashamed to be in front of my own child. I expected to be showered with presents by my guilty parents the next day.
In the shocking light of the new day, however, it turned out that neither of them was ashamed at all. On the contrary – it was explained to me that sex was nothing to be ashamed of – quite the opposite, it was something beautiful.
Beautiful??? Those two thought they looked beautiful while they were at it? God, the self-confidence those people had!
My husband, for his part, was brought up in a conservative family that respects tradition. I suspect the word sex was never once spoken out loud there.
This gave rise to the first of our many clashes over how to bring up the children when it comes to sex.
My husband insisted we stick to the storks-or-birds-and-bees theory to the bitter end. I wanted us to tell the truth – after all, there's nothing shameful about the act of love. Look, my parents even insisted back in the day that it was beautiful.
After a series of rows, in which my husband accused me of being a hippie, a nudist and a shameless hussy, and I accused him of being a narrow-minded horse in blinkers who can't see further than his fossilised snout, we gave Valentin – our elder son – the following anaemic explanation, which was the ultimate compromise of both parental sides' principles.
Sex is when a boy and a girl lie down in bed, hug and kiss.
Valentin seemed barely interested in the question of sex at all. He said “OK”, gave a limp shrug as if to say “yet another pointless piece of information from my parents' pointless life” and went on making videos for his YouTube channel.
The Seed of Knowledge, however, had evidently been slowly sprouting in his head. Because a few days later, one Sunday when we were visiting my parents and the conversation had rather died down, he decided to liven up the atmosphere a bit with the following interesting fact:
“And Mum has sex every night, with Dad and with Nikolay.”
My parents were silent. You'll say their embarrassed silence was down to the fact that Nikolay is the name of our neighbour, whom little Valentin “just happens” to look a lot like.
Actually, Nikolay and Valentin really do look alike, but it's no coincidence at all. It's more down to the fact that they're brothers.
The shock of what he'd heard made my father forget to draw on his cigarette. It was the first time in my conscious life that I'd seen him skip a drag while breathing in. Normally every intake of oxygen he takes is garnished with nicotine. A skipped drag, translated into the smoker's body language, was the equivalent of a skipped heartbeat.
My husband was glaring at me murderously. He was silently sending me signals with his eyes, which I read unmistakably. They were saying: “Why did I, the upstanding citizen, the orderly man, the descendant of a respectable family that holds on to tradition and to the family sitting down at the table together in the evening, have to meet you? You harlot, you – descendant of nudists (not only are you nudists but, even worse, you eat dinner at different times and don't sit down at the table together), what did I do to deserve getting tied to YOU? What heavy karma am I paying off in this life?”
I myself am so shocked by Valentin's account of my own behaviour that I still can't manage to make a sound in my defence. I'm even inclined to agree with my husband.
There are limits, there are limits, there are limits – I even thought for a split second, in tune with the rising general outrage – but this behaviour of mine is beyond the pale!!!
Only little Nikolay, the sweetheart, remains the one island of calm in the room. He's rhythmically slurping his soup with one hand and scrolling through some videos on TikTok with the other.
Valentin somehow sees that his story is going down nowhere near as well as he'd expected. So he decides to show his grandmother and grandfather that there is, after all, one untarnished youth in this family who doesn't give in to his mother's advances. Himself.
“She wants to do it with me too, but I'm the only one in the whole family who resists her, and with me –” Valentin takes on a martyred expression, “Mum has sex by force.”
I won't deny that to this day there's a desire simmering in me to get my own back on my parents. For the nudist beaches and for the beautiful sex scenes I became an unwitting witness to in my teenage years. But this went many times beyond the cruelty of the revenge they deserved.
Back in the day my mother used to run wild, naked and with an unwaxed triangle, on the nudist beaches around Sozopol. But since she became a grandmother, she's changed. She's become a housewife with conservative views on life. She adores boring me with details such as the fact that little Valentin likes his chicken soup without the egg-and-yoghurt thickener. And last Christmas she gave me a POT. She thought and thought, bless her, and decided that a little pot would make me happiest of all. Yet more proof that people mistakenly assume their own priorities are everyone else's too.
I couldn't inflict Valentin's absurd claims on her, which, on top of everything, as you can guess for yourselves, had absolutely nothing to do with the truth (apart from the bit about my husband).
My father, meanwhile, was stubbornly avoiding my gaze. I don't blame him. After all, he was the only man in the room with whom I shared a direct blood tie and on whom I hadn't yet “set my sights”, so to speak.
My parent evidently no longer even dared to breathe, so as not to attract the unnecessary attention of an insatiable beast like me, because he hadn't taken a drag on his cigarette either. It was burning down and its ash was falling helplessly onto the tablecloth. I had to step in quickly and prove my innocence. Otherwise this man would soon die of nicotine deprivation.
“Valentin!!!” I finally managed to speak. “What nonsense are you telling your grandma and grandpa??? When have I ever had sex with your brother????? When have I ever wanted to have sex with you by force??”
Valentin stands his ground, unshakeable.
“Every night!” He looks at me sincerely with his big sparkling light-brown eyes, framed by thick lashes. “When Nikolay and I go to bed in the evening, you come to say ‘Good Night’ and you hug us and kiss us once we're lying down. And you kiss Dad ‘Good night’ separately.”
“So???” Now I remember that for the past month (later I worked out that it was evidently ever since he'd been introduced to the parental version of “what the word sex means”), Valentin has been bolting around the house like a scalded cat every time I try to kiss him “Good night”. I have to pin him down on the bed with my elbows and knees until I've given him a proper kissing. Meanwhile he fights back and wipes the traces of my kisses off his little cheeks in disgust.
“You and Dad explained to me that ‘sex’ means ‘when a boy and a girl lie down in bed, hug and kiss’!!! You're a girl, we're boys! You just wait for us to get into bed and straight away you come and kiss us ‘good night’ and hug us.”
Soon after that, Valyo found out in a biology lesson at school what sex really is. Over dinner he told us he now knew what it was. And that it was much grosser than he'd imagined.
Nikolay, who is 4 years younger, asked what exactly it was.
His brother replied: “Trust me, you're too young to know. I'll tell you, but first I want you to enjoy your childhood in peace.”
