When he was about nine or ten years old, I dreamed that my oldest son had a Pink Panther themed bathroom. When I woke up, I briefly wondered if it meant he was gay but then decided that it didn't mean that.
I concluded that it meant he wasn't "normal" but I didn't feel he was gay. It would be many more years before he would tell me he had concluded he was asexual.
He once told me that if he came out as gay, he knew I would only be mad if I had not realized it myself beforehand. I pride myself on being socially insightful, so I would be aggravated with myself for not seeing it myself without being told but I wouldn't actually care if he was gay.
He did wonder for a time if he was gay because girls do nothing for him but he eventually realized boys do nothing for him either. He's just not really interested in sex.
In 2015, I sent him the following two links that showed up on Metafilter, where I was an active participant at the time:
When he was like two years old, he spent a year as a nudist, refusing to wear clothes at home. He only dressed when we went somewhere because he was required to and understood that.
Like with so many of his crazy-making behaviors, I rolled my eyes and tolerated it. I always told him things like "It's your body. Do what you want." and he often repeated that kind of thing back to me if I didn't approve of something he was doing.
I made a clear distinction between behavior that was eyeroll-worthy but would be tolerated and behavior he needed to actually stop. He learned to give pushback on his own if I crossed the line and tried to make him stop something that was merely eyeroll-worthy because, hey, it was his body.
Mr. Little Nudist with no sense of privacy who used to barge in on me when I was on the toilet and talk to me the whole time I sat there hit puberty and suddenly discovered PRIVACY. I haven't seen his private parts since.
We rarely discuss his sexual orientation. It's a private matter and not my business.
We have a longstanding policy that if it doesn't impact someone else in the family, you don't owe anyone explanations and you are entitled to your privacy. Him not having sex is not going to negatively impact my life.
It doesn't run the risk of him getting someone pregnant, it doesn't expose him to germs that could harm me and it doesn't introduce social complications. How he feels about it or thinks about it is his business, not mine.
When he came out as asexual, it was a brief and undramatic conversation with his mom that we probably spent less than five minutes on, even though we are both very talkative people and can talk for hours. It was not a big deal.
I wish more parents would learn to raise their future adults in a way that made coming out as some variation of queer as undramatic as that brief conversation was for him. He's never stressed about talking to me about the topic, though he mostly doesn't discuss it with me because he feels no need and it's simply not my business.
I have his permission to talk about him on my parenting blog. He used to proofread a lot of my writing for me and I still run things past him and get his permission if I am going to say anything sensitive about him, like this post.
On the one hand, it's not the world's business what his sexual orientation is. On the other hand, I keep returning to wanting to write a parenting blog because I want to tackle the hard topics and help people with hard parenting challenges because my sons were very challenging to raise yet I'm very happy with how they turned out.
This post was read by him and approved before it was published or it would not be here.
I concluded that it meant he wasn't "normal" but I didn't feel he was gay. It would be many more years before he would tell me he had concluded he was asexual.
He once told me that if he came out as gay, he knew I would only be mad if I had not realized it myself beforehand. I pride myself on being socially insightful, so I would be aggravated with myself for not seeing it myself without being told but I wouldn't actually care if he was gay.
He did wonder for a time if he was gay because girls do nothing for him but he eventually realized boys do nothing for him either. He's just not really interested in sex.
In 2015, I sent him the following two links that showed up on Metafilter, where I was an active participant at the time:
- MeFi Projects: Talk or learn about asexuality 201!
- People can understand strange desires; not having desire freaks them out
When he was like two years old, he spent a year as a nudist, refusing to wear clothes at home. He only dressed when we went somewhere because he was required to and understood that.
Like with so many of his crazy-making behaviors, I rolled my eyes and tolerated it. I always told him things like "It's your body. Do what you want." and he often repeated that kind of thing back to me if I didn't approve of something he was doing.
I made a clear distinction between behavior that was eyeroll-worthy but would be tolerated and behavior he needed to actually stop. He learned to give pushback on his own if I crossed the line and tried to make him stop something that was merely eyeroll-worthy because, hey, it was his body.
Mr. Little Nudist with no sense of privacy who used to barge in on me when I was on the toilet and talk to me the whole time I sat there hit puberty and suddenly discovered PRIVACY. I haven't seen his private parts since.
We rarely discuss his sexual orientation. It's a private matter and not my business.
We have a longstanding policy that if it doesn't impact someone else in the family, you don't owe anyone explanations and you are entitled to your privacy. Him not having sex is not going to negatively impact my life.
It doesn't run the risk of him getting someone pregnant, it doesn't expose him to germs that could harm me and it doesn't introduce social complications. How he feels about it or thinks about it is his business, not mine.
When he came out as asexual, it was a brief and undramatic conversation with his mom that we probably spent less than five minutes on, even though we are both very talkative people and can talk for hours. It was not a big deal.
I wish more parents would learn to raise their future adults in a way that made coming out as some variation of queer as undramatic as that brief conversation was for him. He's never stressed about talking to me about the topic, though he mostly doesn't discuss it with me because he feels no need and it's simply not my business.
I have his permission to talk about him on my parenting blog. He used to proofread a lot of my writing for me and I still run things past him and get his permission if I am going to say anything sensitive about him, like this post.
On the one hand, it's not the world's business what his sexual orientation is. On the other hand, I keep returning to wanting to write a parenting blog because I want to tackle the hard topics and help people with hard parenting challenges because my sons were very challenging to raise yet I'm very happy with how they turned out.
This post was read by him and approved before it was published or it would not be here.