Right about the time when my body was on the verge of transforming from pasty-white scrawny child to pudgy awkward beginning-to-pimple preteen, Dad called my brother and me into his den and sat us down for “the talk.” My brother Eric was seven. I was almost nine.

Dad was a man you learned to say yes to. He never demanded a yes sir from any of his ten children, but was more interested in complete and immediate compliance in all things. There was no debating anything. Ever. And if you tried, you’d immediately have to run and grab the paddle or a shoe and then bend over (often with cheeks exposed) for a solid whoopin’. He towered almost six and a half feet off the ground, which, when you’re a kid is way the hell up there. When he would get mad, his eyes would bulge from their sockets, he’d pierce his lips together, and he’d give you a look and a quiet huff that said, “say one more word; I dare you.”

But Dad was also often a jovial man. He played with his kids. He cherished his kids. And he did his best to always teach his kids how to find the lessons in what life was trying to teach them. He was faithful in his marriage and in his church. From what I know, he never permitted a thought to alter him otherwise. He would laugh with you. Wrestle you. Massage your legs when they cramped up in the middle of the night, and as he did, he’d close his eyes ever so, he’d half-grin, and he’d tell you it was going to be all right. And because he was a man of his word, you believed him.

But the day he brought Eric and me into his den, he was neither serious nor jovial. He wasn’t scary, yet he wasn’t inviting. His shrunk back and uneven shoulders said he didn’t want to be there. His tensed eyes said he really didn’t want to be there. Up until that point, I never knew that anything could be awkward for my father.

He grabbed a pad of graph paper and told us to come stand at his desk.

“This is a penis, you already know that,” he said as he doodled a cartoon with male genitals. He drew a ball sack hanging from the guy and explained to us what testicles and scrotums were. He explained to us that our balls would probably get bigger soon. My brother and I kept shooting awkward smirks at each other.

Then Dad got really uncomfortable as he started drawing the outline of a woman’s body. He didn’t get very far with it, just an outline of her head and shoulders. Suddenly he crumpled it up and told us to sit down. I think he realized all too quickly that he couldn’t draw a naked woman for his young boys. Drawing a dude’s junk had been difficult enough.

My brother and I sat down on the chairs he kept against the wall, uncomfortable and entertained all at once. Wanting to giggle. Deathly afraid to be paddled if we did. And then he made things really awkward by bringing Mom into the conversation. “You know how your mom is a woman and she has breasts?” We nodded. I don’t think I knew what breasts were. “She also has another private part that boys don’t have. It’s called a…”

He trailed off discomfited, and switched gears to now leave Mom out of it. “Girls,” he continued, “all girls in the whole world have what’s called a vagina.”

I can’t speak for my brother, but at that point I definitely had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I’d seen my little sisters running around buck naked enough to know they didn’t have penises, but I’d never heard of this weird vagina thing before.

Then Dad clarified that he was talking about “the peaches.” Peaches are what we called vaginas in our home, a term that gives me the serious willies as an adult. I couldn’t help but snicker at it that day, though. I didn’t even know why winkies (our family word for penises) and peaches were so funny, I just knew they were. It probably had to do with the fact that everyone seemed to get so awkward about them, including Dad in that moment.

And, with a new semi-accurate understanding of who had what between their legs, we then learned about… sex.

I was appalled. I was mortified. I was absolutely disgusted.

A man does what now? To a woman?! And you’ve done this to Mom!? And she let you? My thoughts were racing as he explained the ins and outs of it all. Pun intended.

“It’s how babies are made.”

I looked at him in complete disbelief. Not true. Definitely not true. Mom told me, God puts babies in your tummy. They certainly don’t come because you stick your winkie into a girl’s peaches. Uh uh. I won’t believe it. I can’t believe it.

Still, I didn’t debate and I didn’t argue. I just shot occasional glances at my brother to silently ask him if he was also hearing this absurdity. He shot me back more of the same.

Dad then went on to try and explain sperm and eggs, and how that was the way each of us were made.

In a matter of minutes, I went through all the stages of grief. I had lost my innocence, and I had to deal with that.  It started with denial, then moved to anger, then reflection as I thought about all the times I knew my parents must have been getting it on after sending us to bed early, and finally reluctant acceptance.

Eventually Dad finished. He didn’t speak for some time, and suddenly he sighed very loudly and sat back into his creaky office chair. It was the kind of sigh that people sigh when they’ve just accomplished a really huge task. Or maybe it was the kind of sigh that people sigh when they come out unscathed from something that was really scary. But it wasn’t enough of a sigh to dismiss us. No, we knew something else was coming. He had something else to tell us. And whatever it was, terrified him.

“There’s one other thing that’s really important,” he finally said. I think his eyes may have been closed. Or at least mostly closed. His voice softened. And barely audibly, he held up the extended index finger of his left hand, and made a circle with the thumb and fingers of his right hand. He then began to vigorously stroke his left finger up and down.

“Never. Do. This. It’s bad.”

I had no idea why it was bad, but the way he told us it was bad, we knew it was really bad. Neither one of us said anything. We just nodded once again in compliance.

Dad grunted and nodded as well. He stood up from his chair without saying another word about it. “Go help your mother set the table,” he said. And he has never since said a single educational word to us about sex that I can remember.

Eric and I both began giggling and then disappeared to do as we were told.

And I can honestly tell you that neither one of us ever made that appalling hand gesture for at least the next decade.

Neither one of us ever held out one index finger and then stroked it vigorously with the circled thumb and fingers of our other hand.

But later on I certainly did masturbate, which in case you missed it, was what Dad was endeavoring to tell us not to do. Yes, only years after that educational evening in his den, I was masturbating frequently and with wild abandon. In fact, to catch me in a window in which masturbating hadn’t just happened or wasn’t about to happen was probably rare indeed.

But I never made that hand gesture. Ever. Not to anyone. Not to my brother. Not even to myself. Just thinking about the hand gesture made me feel dirty and evil inside, and if I’m being honest, it still does to this day.

Dad had gotten his point across, and he had installed the fear into us that he set out to install. It just happened that the message got a bit distorted in translation.

“Never. Do. This. It’s bad.”

Now all these years later, I sometimes think back to that awkward evening in Dad’s den, and I understand the real lesson to be had in all of it.

When we have something important to say or teach others, we shouldn’t beat around the bush with it (again, pun intended). People won’t get it. This applies to parenting our kids as much as it applies to our friendships, our social interactions, and our workplaces.

To be effective communicators we need to be bold about what we want others to know. We need to be non-apologetic. And we need to be clear.

It does nobody any good if we worry so much about making things awkward that nobody ever knows what we wanted or what we were working toward in the first place. It does nobody any good if we worry about being so politically correct that we alienate those who don’t connect with such thinking. It does nobody any good if we try to phrase our ideas and words in such a way that they’ll never offend anyone. And even worse, sometimes when we do this, we send the wrong message to others.

If I mean x, I need to say x. I don’t need to give a complicated formula with lots of other variables, and expect others to solve for x when I already know damn well what x is and I want them to understand x. This is what I learned from Dad that night more than anything else, even if it took another decade or two and a willy rubbed raw to finally sink in.

Read Also

His Ex is Ruining Our Marriage

Balancing Step-Parenting and Marital Harmony

Rebuilding a Marriage in the Sandwich Generation Squeeze

A Marriage Tested by Cancer

His Business Crashed — And So Did Our Marriage

Dating a Recovering Alcoholic

Is It Weird to Date a Relative?

His Cheatin’ Heart

What’s Our Relationship Status?

Should You Give an Ex a Second Chance?

Long-Distance Love vs. Local Connection

Trust in a Strained Marriage: Letters in the Attic

Dating Rules: Smart Strategy or Outdated Nonsense?