I was watching Nip/Tuck with my dear old mum last week, and she expressed shock and dismay near the end of the episode, when Sean and Julia were explaining the facts of life to their daughter. “Tsk. Tsk. That’s disgusting!” opined the mater. “What?” sez Mudd. “She’s only nine!”
“But she’s going through an early puberty!” “She’s still too young to know.”
I let it drop there, remembering that when she started to give me “the talk,” I had been having regular sex for almost three years, had understood the biology of it for at least eight years, had the required safety instruction in grade eight, had been bringing girls home for years, some of which spent the night, and had slept with several adult women in my folks’ social group. And that, at that time, I was nearly the same age that she was when she got married, and that she has said that she went on her honeymoon with absolutely no idea what to expect. And that within two months of her broaching the subject, I’d moved out of the house and into my girlfriend’s place.
And that when she did attempt to impart her wisdom to me, it was in terms so absurdly vague that she’d been uncomfortably tiptoeing around for quite a while before it dawned on my what she was talking about and collapsed into helpess laughter.
Anyway, it occurred to me that no-one else’s parents could possibly be that clueless… And then I remembered that everything is relative, and that someone here can probably top that.
So… anyone else’s parents astonishingly naive? (On any topic?)
When I was 17 I went to the pub as I usually did on a Thursday night. Afterwards I went to my then friend/now boyfriend’s house. We talked. A LOT. At 6am I decide it’s time to go home.
I got home. Crept up the stairs and just as I got the top of the stairs my dad came out of the bathroom. He said hello then contined to get ready for work. Being a man, he didn’t notice I was wearing the same clothes from the night before. He thought I’d got in the night before. He didn’t realise I’d been gone all night!
So I got changed and went to school! And my parents were never the wiser.
I think my parents were naive, although possibly in another context than you mean. They were born in 1934 and 1939, and even though it was the '60s and '70s and the times they-were-a-changing, they seemed not to have progressed beyond the mid-‘50s in attitude and outlook. The times when I came of age were just alien to my parents. They didn’t know what to make of hippies and rock music and drugs, and other than having heavy distrust, they seemed not to want to find out, and they were determined that I would not be part of it. They were not the most enlightened people. They had some really strange ideas about a lot of things. There were a lot of arguments about things that, in retrospect, are so trivial that they don’t even bear mentioning. But feelings ran high back then. I wasn’t alone, either. My peers’ families were going through the same thing. It’s situations like this that enable me say that I do not miss my adolescence a bit.
Sometimes I’m not sure if my mom is stupid, naive or in deep, deep denial. She comes up with some real zingers now and then. (and dammit! I can’t think of a single good example now! :mad: )
My mom once asked me to explain to her exactly what it is that two gay men do with each other. I still don’t know what that was about, but surely she wasn’t actually asking for information??? I couldn’t bring myself to tell her, by the way.
My parents got engaged first, found out about sex after. The engagement was apparently the signal their parents had been waiting for to break out the “facts of life” talk.
My parents (well, really, my mother) are blessed with an inordinate amount of unearned trust in society. “Giving the benefit of the doubt” was a weekly term in our household.
Of course she was! I think my mom was 60 when she asked me (or told me she had just found out about) oral sex. I have pretty much blocked that conversation from my memory.
Drugs. My father hated them. He did not know shit about them. Needless to say, it made my adolescence hell.
Yes, I did do drugs in high school. Yes I did come home high, but for crying out loud, if you are going to accuse me of being on “dope” then at least do it when I am on something. Continually, I came home blown to the wind, yet not a peep, and yet continually I would come home sober and straight and I would get yelled at, threatened, and generally abused.
And what did I learn from it all? Never trust anyone on what they say about drugs when they refer to them as “dope”. Stupid jackass.
My mom is mind-numbingly naive at times, though sometimes I think it’s a put-on. She reads the scandal sheets (Enquirer-types) and will spout off about how “They found Bigfoot!” and expect the rest of us to take it as gospel.
She’s also terribly sheltered about what slang words mean what. She’ll pick up something from my sisters or me, and then repeat it wrong. I cringe when I think of this sweet, gray-haired, grandmotherly-Church-Lady type woman has ignorantly uttered.
The one that really cracked me up was when she was relating to my sister some problems I’d been having with a friend of mine. I kept on calling him a prick. “He’s a prick!” I’d say. I figured she knew what this meant, or at least knew it wasn’t polite. But there she was, on the phone with my sister, saying, “What did yosemite call him? Oh yes! Daniel [not his real name] is a prick!”
I guess you had to be there, but it was pretty hilarious. That’s not a word she would have used had she known what it meant.
I’m amazed. My parents were clued in to everything. They were amazingly laid-back people, too. My father was apparently quite the delinquent before he found out he had a kid on the way.
My extended family is mostly made up of criminals & the insane. My parents aren’t naíve about anything, that I’m aware of…
My parents picked me up from a party once and drove the 20 minutes home with my mother never once suspecting I was really loaded. I thought the drunk, naked people hanging from trees at the party would have been a good give-away, but I guess not.
And I’ll never forget the time she rather loudly asked “what’s a dildo?” in the middle of a crowded family restaurant.
Well, there was the talk after my father died and my mother started dating again. Had to explain to her that menopause did not relieve her of the responsibility of using condoms. “Why?” “Have you heard of AIDS?”
I’ll never forget my mom explaining that it was good that we moved to the country so that her kids were not exposed to illegal drugs. My brother and I just looked at her and blinked. “What? You can get drugs here?” To which **verbenabeast ** replies, “It depends. How much do you need?”
My mother isn’t a stupid woman, but she falls for urban legends constantly. Like the LSD on a candy stamp, and that once it gets into your system, it NEVER LEAVES. :rolleyes:
Oh, and she listens to Silvia Brown. Silvia freaking Brown. And she even has my sister listening to her too. Oh well. At least I was able to convince her that John Edward is a fraud.
My friend’s mom is hopelessly naive about everything. We called her “Snow White” while growing up. We’d come home really drunk and be vomiting in the toilet and she’d be taking care of us and worrying about the “flu bug” we caught.
I had lunch with her once and said “Bon Appetit” before eating and she asked, “what does that mean?”
My mother isn’t really naive but during her recent Led Zeppelin craze she asked me, “does ‘back door man’ mean what I think it means”? I thought that was kind of cute.
My mum’s so un-naive it’s funny. On one of her trips overseas she said me and my girlfriend could use her double bed if we wanted, as long as we changed the sheets before she got home. I appreciated the thought but declined to take her up on it.
My mom is stuck in a time warp. It’s perennially the 1950’s.
When I was a freshman in highschool I was invited to a party. My first real party by a guy friend of mine.
I was very excited.
I asked my mom if I could go and she said so innocently, " Do you need for me to wrap a present?"
I was so mortified that my mom thought it was some ghey birthday party I didn’t go.
Which, years later, I realize, was the most perfect way to handle the situation and I plan on using it on my kids.
