My daughter's reality show

We met for coffee at a diner a few blocks away. Laura told me she practically lived with her high school boyfriend -- slept over at his place all the time. When she got pregnant, it was his parents who took her to get an abortion. Her parents never even found out. They didn't seem to want to know what had been going on, was her impression. They had thought of her as "the good girl" and trusted nothing was going on. Even now, she was full of regrets. She wished she hadn't been so active then. She felt she had allowed herself to be used, wasn't really ready for it, and the abortion still made her unhappy. "I wasn't really making my own decisions," she said. "And the sex was more about pleasing him than me."

As I walked home, it was all swirling around in my head. You want your daughter to enjoy her body. But you want her to be ready for it. Because you don't want her doing it just for him, or to be cool, or to impress her friends. It should be for herself. I thought about my own early experiences, which didn't take place until college. My first boyfriend wasn't the one I lost my virginity to. But he was the first one that I slept in the same bed with overnight (never actually having intercourse). And I remembered how truly wondrous that was. The first time I actually felt another person's body up against my own. Naked together. Soft skin to soft skin. The giggly, silly newness of it all.

But even so, did I want her to be experiencing this when she was so young? With the possibility of pregnancy looming? No! It seemed like I had to find a way to encourage and discourage at the same time.

Laura and I had agreed on one thing. The best thing you can do is let your daughter know how you feel. Beyond that, she's going to make her own decisions. And, as the mom, I was not likely to be the first to know. In fact, there seems to be a need for our teenagers to do all this in secrecy. I know one mother who put one of those programs on her daughter's computer that read all her e-mails and could see what porn sites she might visit and which child molesters she might have been chatting with. I considered it briefly, I admit, but it is such an invasion of privacy that I couldn't.

When the subject of "Ben sleeping over" didn't come up for a few weeks, I dared to believe that maybe my daughter had accepted my feelings on the subject. Then, about a week before she was going to camp, we were watching a documentary on MTV, "The Social History of Piercing." We were in my bedroom, and I was glad she was there. She often used to station herself in front of my bedroom TV while I worked on my computer, and it seemed like "old times." So I was working on my computer, turning around every once in a while to watch. I was especially turning around when they started talking about piercings on the hoods of men's penises and near the clitoris. I didn't even know the piercing thing was "happening" in these strategic locations! So now I guess you could say that I was learning from watching her shows. And these 20-ish kids on TV were talking about how much better these piercings made the sex and yes, this wasn't a comedy like "Sex and the City" on a pay channel like HBO, this was a documentary on the channel whose demographics are specifically geared toward the teenager.

"Do you know people who do this?" I asked her.

"Yeah," she said, as if anyone should know that of course people get pierced in these places. It was on MTV, so why shouldn't she think it wasn't general information?

"Do you know anyone who has one?"

"I knew someone who wanted to do it," she said. "But her mom wouldn't let her."

"What do you think of doing that?"

"Yuck," she said.

I turned back to my computer with relief.

"But I do want to get a tattoo," she added. "Something small and pretty."

"I don't know," I said, hating how stuffy I sounded. "Once you get it, you're stuck with it forever."

"That's why I'd put it where you wouldn't see it when I'm wearing clothes."

Oh, right, I thought, so only her boyfriend would see it when she was naked. I refrained from saying that or something equally negative like, well, you know it hurts. She knows it hurts. And it's her body. So I kept my mouth shut.

And then she asked, "Can Ben sleep over the night before I go to camp?"

I sighed. "No."

"Why not?"

"For the same reasons I've already told you."

When that night arrived, she and Ben went out to a nearby Mexican restaurant to spend their last time together before being separated for the summer. They were in the living room watching TV together when my husband and I went to bed that night.

The next day, Ben arrived again early in the morning with bagels and orange juice and flowers. They had breakfast in her bedroom with the door locked.

The day was the usual frenzy of last-minute labeling, laundry and packing. She was moody, and I had to remind myself that even though she was happy to be going back to camp, she was not happy about saying goodbye to Ben. He was going wilderness camping and would be gone until after she returned in August. Maybe I saw him as a predator. But they had grown close, and she really was going to miss him.

After we got everything in the car, I took my tour of the apartment to make sure all the lights (and computers) were off. I checked her bedroom. And saw that she had packed the sheets off her bed. And she had scattered the red and gold petals of Ben's flowers onto the white mattress pad. I smiled. It was so romantic. And I couldn't help wondering. Ben had stayed quite late the night before. And he had arrived quite early that morning -- before my husband or I were up. Had he never really left? How far had they gone? I stared at the flower petals on the bed, as if they would reveal the truth. The only thing I saw was my own curiosity. And the hope that whatever they were doing, she would not get hurt. And that it would be wondrous.

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