If You Make Your Bed Hard, You Better Lie In It

The reasoning behind my parents pushing abstinence on me.

The coming of my puberty and the subsequent years after is another story in itself. I’m not sure exactly when the constant hassling and badgering began, but I know that it started as subtle hints. As time went on, the continuous reminders to not have sex became more frequent and blunt. A week before moving into the dorm here in Murray, I was explicitly told by my mother: “I don’t want you calling me and saying that you got a girl pregnant.” Even though I had heard it all before, in different terms, it still irked me. I know that males are made out to be nothing more than womanizers [or pigs, as the Trojan commercial depicts], but for my parents to basically say that I have animal instincts and “wouldn’t be able” to stop myself, is a slap in the face. On first thought, one may believe that it’s just parents trying to take care of their first born, but it’s a little more complicated than that.

In the summer of 2007, while I was attending Elizabethtown Community and Technical College, it seemed as if everything was one astonishing revelation after another – and making the affair more peculiar was how things were spoken of so casually. My grandfather referred to his life as if it were approaching its conclusion (“...just in case I’m not around this time next year.”), the entire family realized my grandmother’s declining physical and psychological health, and I learned why I get besieged so much about sexual activity.

The joke at the beginning of the summer was that my father was a “preemie.” Now, of course, I had just assumed that he was born before he was supposed to. And to an extent, that would be correct - but like many of the things in this manifesto of sorts, there is a back-story that needs to be told. Before my mother and father got married in 1985, my mother had married a soldier shortly prior to his deployment to Germany. My grandmother brought this point up when my parents announced their intentions to wed. In response, my mother quipped: “At least I’m not getting married with a big stomach underneath my dress.” Turmoil resulted and at the age of twenty-eight, my father learned that he was conceived while my grandparents weren’t married. My father was born in March of 1957, so you can imagine how much of a rush there was for them to get married – society not being as accepting of an unwed mother as it is today.

While in talks with my grandmother this summer, I learned of her struggle to support an upstart family: how she worked in the payroll department at Fort Knox, how stressful the job was - adding the numbers manually, making sure that not even one cent was miscalculated. The office in which she worked did not have sufficient air, even with windows open, and fans weren’t able to be used because of how they would blow the paper work away. She articulated about how much hell it was living with my great-grandmother (John Thomas’ mother) and how the majority of the money that went towards the house was hers. Another thing that vexed her was how instrumental my great-grandmother was in their life. She has warned me, on numerous occasions, to be careful of whom I love because of this, contributing the fact that one time my grandfather told her that his mother was “more important to him that her.”

All of these circumstances have led to my parent’s abstinence-only view of how I should be raised, because apparently if a predecessor made a mistake, you’re bound to repeat it with no expectation of digression. The Old Spice Classic scent body wash has a tag-line on the bottle: “The Original. If Your Grandfather Hadn’t Worn It, You Wouldn’t Exist.” So, maybe the scent is a blessing and a curse.