A Fragile Web

It is my first year teaching sex education. I enter a room with a wall of windows that look out on a Baptist church. It’s a classroom, but there are no desks—only a circle of sixteen chairs.

I begin arranging name tags on a table. I haven’t yet learned there’s no need to alphabetize names for such a small group of middle schoolers. Eventually, I will just toss the names out like constellations.

Frankie is the first to arrive. He’s wearing a black fedora and a Pink Floyd T-shirt. His jeans are rolled up just above his Birkenstocks, and his wrists are wrapped in colorful braided bracelets that look handmade.

He holds up a small Bluetooth speaker. “Do you know who sang backup vocals on Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’?” he asks with a smile. Sharing music is how Frankie says, “Hello. Nice to see you again.”

“Listen,” he says, as he hits the play button. The backup singer sounds familiar, but I don’t know who it is.

Frankie looks at me in disbelief. “Didn’t you grow up in the ’80s?”

Diego is the next to arrive, and he’s wearing his soccer uniform. I know what he’ll say before I hear the words: He needs to leave early to get to his match on time. 

“Sting,” Frankie tells me. “It’s Sting.”

“What?” Now it’s my turn to be in disbelief. “Play it again.”

Frankie plays it again, and Diego begins bopping his head, unsure of the words but enjoying the beat. Sure enough, it’s Sting.

Logan enters with a half-eaten blueberry muffin in one hand and a bowl covered with a dish towel in the other. He ignores the music. It must be his family’s turn to provide snacks today.

Charley arrives wearing her Damian Lillard jersey. The small Bluetooth speaker is playing nothing but guitar chords now, and Charley gives Frankie a quick confused look. Frankie smiles. Charley turns to me and asks if I watched last night’s Blazers game. I tell her I was looking for her in the crowd.

Avery and Casey enter together. My hunch is Casey has a crush on Avery, but my hunch might be wrong. They sit across from one another in the circle.

I pull a ball of blue yarn from the supply box, and the speaker goes silent.

I never thought of myself as a teacher—certainly not a sex education teacher. One moment I was reading a job listing for an administrative assistant at a Unitarian Universalist church. The next moment I was searching their website for any mention of converting the heathens or killing the sinners. Seeing no such declarations, I applied for the job and got it. The church had a shortage of adults to teach comprehensive sex-ed classes to middle school youth on Sunday mornings. My boss asked me to be one of the teachers, but first I needed to complete a fifteen-hour training.

In the training, we were asked to reflect on the messages we received about our bodies and sexuality when we were children. Then we were shuffled into small groups to explore topics like body image, gender identity, attraction, puberty, and healthy relationship traits. We were told to talk about these topics without sharing our personal stories.

So what I didn’t say is that before puberty steamrolled through my body, I was told I would eventually start my period. But I don’t remember being told that a uterus had anything to do with it. I grew up surrounded by boy cousins, and you’d find me wrestling with them in the dirt before you’d find me wearing a dress. When two strange mounds popped out of my chest uninvited—things the boys called boobies—I started to wrap Ace bandages tightly around my body to flatten the inevitable for as long as I could.

When I was a teenager, I don’t remember questioning why girls were supposed to wear makeup or shave their armpits when boys didn’t have to. Instead, I brushed blue powder on my eyelids and used an eyeliner pencil to increase the size of a mole on my cheek, trying to make it as large as Cindy Crawford’s. All this effort allowed me to have some control over my body—but it also left me feeling completely inadequate, no matter how long I spent in front of the mirror.

By the end of the training, I understood the difference between processing my own baggage about gender and sexuality and inviting young people to think about how society’s baggage impacts their view of themselves. I learned not to say, “When I was a kid, I felt like Cindy Crawford’s mole was taunting me from the covers of magazines. It was an unachievable beauty standard that made me feel ugly.” Instead, I learned to ask, “How does the media influence someone’s feelings about their body?”

We start every class by answering anonymous questions from the previous session’s Question Box. More youth trickle in as I read the first question: “Does it feel different kissing with braces?” Charley is the only one who recently got braces. I purposely don’t look at her as I read the question aloud. Avery says a friend got their braces stuck in their girlfriend’s braces the first time they kissed. They both had to get their braces repaired. Diego says he’s never heard his friends say kissing’s any different with braces.

Sierra stays quiet as usual, nervously tapping her feet on the carpeted floor. Frankie tries to balance a pencil on his nose. I read the next question: “Why are women supposed to handle everything in the kitchen?” Logan says he thinks it’s ridiculous that women are supposed to handle everything in the kitchen because he’s a great cook, better than his mom and his sister. His voice has changed over the last couple of months; it’s noticeably deeper now.

Before I was paid to work with teenagers, I did it for free. I was a volunteer mentor at a Portland middle school with one of the highest dropout rates in the state. I was paired with an eighth-grade girl who had been suspended three times for fighting. I had never thrown a punch nor been punched in my life. She liked hamburgers. I was a vegetarian. Her mom had recently been diagnosed with cancer. I had not lost anyone I loved to that disease—not yet.

When I first met her, I was afraid of her, afraid of what could erupt within her. But sometime during the first month, I realized there was nothing to fear. I saw a kid struggling to make sense of a world where throwing punches was easier than using words. We bonded over french fries and milkshakes and a trip to Mount St. Helens where we walked beside fireweed, a plant that thrives in the aftermath of what we humans would describe as complete destruction. Its pink and purple flowers sprout from the cracked earth, reminding us that strength and beauty can bloom from fragile terrain.

I invite everyone to stand in a circle as I start to distribute index cards. Every middle schooler gets a card with a sex-education term written in large capital letters. Eventually, I will learn to cut these cards so they fit inside the name tags, but today, they place their cards on the floor by their feet.

They take turns tossing the ball of blue yarn back and forth across the circle. Someone who got the term consent tosses the yarn to the person who has the term healthy relationship trait, saying, “These terms are connected because it’s important in a relationship to make sure both people are comfortable with whatever touching is happening between them.”

The yarn keeps traveling back and forth, and eventually a fragile web of blue wool connects the group. We break for a snack, and Logan points out that he—not his mom or sister—baked the blueberry muffins. I wait for everyone else to grab
a muffin before I take one, and then I begin collecting the index cards.

I pick up cards that read media literacy, body image, contraception, peer pressure, pornography, and pregnancy. There are lots of daunting p-words in sex education, but the scariest one is pleasure. Critics of comprehensive sex education might ask, “If middle schoolers learn that sex feels good, what’s to stop them from trying it?” But lots of things feel good, like playing soccer or baking muffins, and we don’t avoid these topics or shame kids for being curious about them. Instead, we’ve figured out ways, like using shin guards and oven mitts, to make these experiences safer than they would be without these interventions. I’m only a few months into teaching these classes, but I already understand that sex education is an intervention, too.

I notice that one card—the pleasure card—is missing from the deck. I turn and see it sticking out of Frankie’s fedora like a feather. With the help of that pencil he never balanced on his nose, he’s added his own creativity to the card. It now reads Mr. Pleasure.

Later, I will learn to pause when I need to say something but am not sure I can say it with a straight face. I don’t yet know the importance of this, though, so I head straight toward Frankie.

“Frankie,” I say, “I need that card now.” Despite my impatience, I’m smiling because this is such a Frankie thing to do. It’s definitely not something I would have written about myself during puberty, or at any point in my life. The other middle schoolers have noticed the card, and Mr. Pleasure is enjoying the reactions he’s getting.

Frankie turns toward me, his brown eyes shining bright. He offers a slight smile that tells me he’s not as shocked as he sounds when he asks, “What? Why?”

When I reflect on the whats and whys of sex education, I realize there’s often more than one answer. There are surface answers, like “Class is over. I need to collect the supplies, including the pleasure card you stuck in your hat.” There are deeper answers, too, but those take time to reveal themselves. 

Six years after the day I collected those index cards, I received an email from Frankie’s parents telling me he had died. He was nineteen years old. As I read the email for the tenth time, wiping tears of disbelief from my eyes, I remembered Frankie standing in a circle connected to his friends by a fragile web of blue wool. I realized that my insistence on getting the pleasure card back wasn’t really about him, but my own fear of what his parents would think of me if I allowed him to leave the room with that card in his hat.

Frankie’s parents asked me to offer a eulogy at his memorial service. Under a canopy of tall fir trees, I looked out at his loved ones, who wore hats in his honor. I wore a blue fedora. I thought about the last time I was under trees this tall. This was before the light in Frankie’s eyes had been dimmed by addiction. I took a group of middle schoolers to a ropes course, and Frankie was one of the first to volunteer to walk across a tightrope. I watched him high up in the trees, his body held safe by a harness, his arms extended out wide. One by one, Frankie’s friends followed his lead, balancing courage and uncertainty with every step. 

Sex education is about so much more than sex. It’s about balancing the courage and joys of loving with the uncertainty and risks of losing. It’s as much about navigating the fragile terrain of childhood as it is about finding fireweed, moments of strength and beauty blooming from the cracked earth.

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