The Talk

It is time to have The Talk with my 9 year old daughter.
For one thing, she is already developing. Thanks to hormones in meats and milk, I fear that puberty will be settling in early. God knows I already have a 9 year old teenager.
Then my mother in law tells me that the women in her family always seem to go into puberty at an early age anyway. We have, maybe, a year. Hopefully two, but I'm not betting on it.
For another thing, when I picked her up at school on Friday, she was talking nonstop. And talking nonstop about BOYS. Apparently there is a child in her class who feels like she must have a boyfriend. And then I hear these words from my daughter. "Every man she's been interested in has just walked away from her." Did I just hear the word, "man"? Oh, yeah. It's time.

You must understand that I am in new territory here. My mother did not give me "The Talk." She was way too embarrassed and shy to have done anything like that. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that both of my parents (God rest their souls) were convinced I was still a virgin when I announced that my husband and I were going to have a baby. As a teenager, most of my information came from a cousin: information which, by the way, was WRONG. I had to figure things out for myself. Thankfully I was one of the dreaded "good girls" and didn't have any issues. Then a couple of health courses and some women's studies courses in college straightened me out.

I don't want to risk my daughter having to wait until she's in college to figure this stuff out on her own. Now, she's way too young (IMHO) at the age of 9 for me to just hand her a copy of "Our Bodies, Our Selves." I'm thinking maybe of going more along the lines of the American Girl series of The Care and Keeping of You. There are some other books that I will flip through...but I have to decide how much to tell her.

When I informed my husband that we had reached the age in which we must give The Talk, this was his response. "Oh no. YOU have to give The Talk. My part of the talk is, "I will kill the first boy you bring home, as an example to any future boyfriends." Yeah, that's a dad for you.

Oh boy. Here we go.