Kissing

My first kiss was not consensual.  That's one thing I realized from starting this blog.  As detailed in the first post, I was chased under a table and kissed, repeatedly, then pushed down on a friend's couch and kissed.  It was not violent.  I'm not going into some traumatic flashback about the whole thing.  I'm fine.  I like kissing now.  Have even found it at times in my life to be like a mind-altering drug.  But for years, kissing seemed like something boys "did to" girls and girls fought against.

Kids in third grade talk about kisses - with hope, with disgust.  Friends share with me that third grade is when they had their first kiss.  We played truth or dare in those tires, but I somehow avoided the kissing dares.  Maybe I only ever took truth?

I didn't kiss a boy until seventh grade when my friend's birthday activities suddenly morphed into "spin the bottle" and "seven minutes in heaven" (go in the closet with a boy and...what? ).  I can still see the "Rock the Casbah" video playing, smell the musty basement.  As we tentatively approached kissing games, we were always prepared to break into "pass the balloon" or "freeze dance" at the sound of parents' footsteps on stairs.  I was intrigued by boys but still freaked out by kissing.  At that point it was more about insecurity: I was pretty sure I'd do it wrong and people would giggle about me when I wasn't around.  I felt that way about most things by 7th grade.  It didn't help that we all had braces that clinked together and I was susceptible to cold sores that were forever erupting across my top lip, rendering me the leper at a kissing game.  At the time I didn't realize that pressure was one of the triggers for cold sores and I played the french horn (cold metal mouthpiece pushing into mouth with braces cutting from the inside).  Even the pressure of awkward teenage kisses probably triggered further eruptions.  I was cold-sore free when I was told to go in the closet with Jeff V, a sweet boy who towered above me.  It was my first french kiss and it wasn't delicious, it wasn't terrible.  He smelled like Polo cologne.  I cricked my neck.

My first positive memory of kissing doesn't come until the summer after 8th grade when Dave Mack invited me to spend a weekend at his family's beach house on Long Beach Island.  They were exotic, the Mack family - rich like I'd never experienced, sophisticated, snobby.  They had a chef and a housekeeper.  They had two houses and still vacationed in Europe.  They took me to a French restaurant and a Broadway show.  The boys did real drugs and drove a convertible Cabriolet.  They lived on a lake.

Dave was 17.  I was 14.  While his older brothers and their super-chic girlfriends did drugs around a campfire on the beach, I walked away across the dark sand, scared of pot, embarrassed at my prudishness.  Dave followed.  We ended up under a deserted house on stilts, me crying that I felt left out, he telling me he'd rather be with me than smoke weed, rather be with me than anything.  He kissed me and it was a new kind of kiss.  Gentle, confident: he had kissed before.  We lay back in the cool sand for hours just kissing, light touching, my whole body coming alive.  Later that night, back at the beach house, there was a light tap on the door of the room I shared with his brother's girlfriend and as if prearranged, Dave was suddenly in my room and Beth was off to Eric's room.  The dreamy kissing continued, some more touching, still sweet, innocent, but escalating.  I was short of breath.  I didn't know where it was going, how I would stop it.

Boom.  His German military father threw open the door and barked (in German) for the boys to get back to bed.  I was humiliated.  I pulled down my pajama shirt.  The next morning, scary German father roused Dave at 5am and screamed at him, forced him to run up and down the beach until he threw up in the sand.  That relationship was done by the end of summer, but not before I'd given in and started smoking pot with them and even watched them do cocaine.  Disoriented from the marijuana, desperate to fit in, the sexual exploration was pushed further than I wanted.  But I got out intact.  I scared me off drugs for years.

I haven't talked to my daughter about kissing.  I'm not opposed to it, but I tend to let her take the lead and on this subject, she is not leading.  We don't talk about boyfriends or girlfriends except in the context of adults we know - ie, "that's your uncle's girlfriend" or "those two were girlfriends but now they're going to be each other's wives."  She knows the basics of procreation, including some modern concepts since our gay friends have a sperm donor and she had a lot of questions about the technical aspect of that.  Her closing line after I explained a sperm bank was: "A cup of sperm...that's a weird present!"  Sure is, my dear, unless you've ordered it.  And if anyone ever gives you one, call the police.

I actually have issues with parents who like to use adolescent terminology with little kids.  It's rampant, parents asking first graders, "Is he your boyfriend?" and putting together little montages of cute little boys and girls handing each other roses to romantic pop songs.  The Nickelodeon shows with their strange adultification of young kids, the eight-year-old boy character saying "she's hot" about a grown woman.  I think it's the heteronormative stuff that bums me out so much.  How rare it still is for someone to say, "Do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend?"  But even beyond that, let them be.  They don't need to know about all this stuff yet.  They're kids.  That said, S loves Katy Perry and half her songs are about blackouts and menage-a-trois, so... 

One thing I notice being so involved in S's school is that children develop at different paces in every arena.  Academically, socially, physically and certainly in terms of awareness of romance, attraction, even sex.  By third grade, I knew where Jason Zappa was at every moment of every day.  I cared more about whether he was laughing at a joke I made than anyone else in the room.  I made him cards with penguins on them because I heard he liked penguins.  I didn't want to kiss him but I did want to be the most important person to him.  I wanted him to love me.  I loved him.  S seems not to have any of that yet.  With girls or boys.  She cares for her friends, but no one seems to rise above, no one seems to torture her, she doesn't look for approval from anyone or talk about them disproportionately just to hear the sound of their name.  Yet.

In the car the other day, a friend's five-year-old son was telling us about how he had another life before this one and he was married and had kids and lived in New York City and his parents were called Fred and Martha.  This kid is fascinating, takes fantasy to a level I've never experienced, speaks with such authority I find myself wondering if past lives are maybe a real thing.

"So when you married Lucille, did you guys have to kiss?" his mom asks.
"Yep," he says.
"Was it ok or kind of gross?"
"It was ok.  Because we had to kiss to be married."
"Oh."

His mom and I exchange rear view mirror glances - this is awesome.  Then it occurs to me, this is an opportunity.

"What do you think about that, S?" I ask.
"I don't know," she answers.
"Do you think about kissing sometimes?" Ugh, that was clunky.
"I don't care," she says, not answering the question.
"But, um, do kids talk about kissing in your class?"
"I don't know," she is shut down. "I don't care."
After a silence, she changes the subject to the upcoming seafood fest and whether she can have lobster, oysters, and calimari.  She feels romantic love for seafood.

Later, I say to my friend over a glass of wine, "She's really not interested at all.  And at that age I was definitely thinking about boys.  What do you think it means?"
"I think she doth protest too much," my friend says.  "What I heard was that she didn't want to talk about it with you.  I think those conversations are going on out of your hearing."
I want to protest too much.  I realize I don't want that to be true.  I want her to tell me about her longings, confusing feelings, desires, dreams.  And she does, with some.  But I didn't tell my mom when I started having those kind of feelings, that's for sure.  And though I am close to my one daughter in a unique and heart-wrenching way, she is not supposed to want to talk to me about everything.  She is supposed to hold some things for herself.

I compile a list of phone numbers and email addresses of the adults in our lives that she adores - there are many - and decide that one of these days, I'll hand it to her and say, offhandedly, "These are all people you can call if you ever need to talk about something and I'm not who you want to talk to."  I just want to make sure she can talk to someone trustworthy.  It doesn't have to be me.  I want her to talk to someone older, someone with perspective not so she won't kiss or love or explore, but so that she will know what consensual is and what it isn't.  So she will open herself only as much as she wants to at each moment.  And kissing will be a portal to pleasure whenever her lips first touch those of someone she loves.