But the authors of those articles were right about one thing: this was happening because boomer parents were more permissive, happier to support their children, than previous generations. In my particular case, my car I needed to do my job, and get to my way-out-in-the-sticks apartment, had just died. It was the second I'd killed that summer. My paycheck was barely enough to cover my weekly rent at a fleabag motel closer to work. My folks bailed me out: they invited me to come home with them.
And it basically worked. It was essentially okay to be a teenager again, except for the sexual logistics. Sarah, an even later bloomer than me, actually lost her virginity during those futon-in-the-hallway years, albeit not on the futon in the hallway. But her parents are very conservative and very Christian, so her mother was none too happy to find a birth-control pill packet in the garbage. Tearful confrontations with both parents followed. Still, she told me, it was strange: she'd spent several nights at her boyfriend's apartment, and had been dating him for a good chunk of time when the news surfaced. "I assumed they would have assumed that had already happened," she said.
My friend Jeanne, like myself, elected to avoid sex in the confines of her parents' home, though she did have a couple of brief relationships while she lived there. One was long-distance; she invited him to visit while her parents were out of town for a week. After that relationship ended, she took up with another boomerang kid, but they spent most of their time at his house. She told me it was half a matter of convenience (he lived closer to where she worked than her parents did) and half a matter of acoustics (his house was simply much quieter).
I, on the other hand, was left with just one outlet: masturbation. While my parents were moving me out of the apartment I lived in before my move home, I realized there was no safe, discreet place to stash my vibrator, and trashed it before they could find it. Months later it occurred to me that, just as I had no desire to have an awkward conversation about a vibrator I already owned, I didn't want to explain any unmarked packages that came for me in the mail. Or any little cellophane bags from the sex shop in Boise. For some reason, the drugstore didn't occur to me.
Not that any of that mattered, because while I was at school, my folks began remodeling their bathroom, and installed a Jacuzzi tub.
Sex-starved, I answered an ad from a boy 400 miles away. |
I discovered that if I angled myself just so against the Jacuzzi jets, the pressure was consistent and intense enough to send me straight to heaven. This was terrific, except for four things: 1) the lock on the bathroom door didn't work; 2) during the remodel, the cabinets had been torn out, so I couldn't pull a drawer in front of the door as I had in my younger years; 3) a shower curtain had not been installed; and 4) my mother is the sort of person who will waltz right into the bathroom and pee, regardless of who's already in there. This happened several times, and each time I flipped my legs back into the tub, took a deep breath, and pretended everything was normal. But she knew what was going on, and I knew she knew; she once she said sheepishly, "Oh my. I guess I should have knocked," then waltzed in anyway.
I got pissed off whenever this happened. Not necessarily at Mom but at my absurd situation. I felt everything I'd felt at fifteen, only that much more vigorously. I hated spending eight hours a day indoors, at a desk, in an ugly building, doing work that bored me. I hated not having a social life. I looked forward to moving out with much more enthusiasm than I'd looked forward to graduating from high school.
Teenagers are angry because, cognitively and physically, they are adults, yet they don't get to lead adult lives. Those of us who negotiated adolescence relatively cheerfully did so because we knew we'd get our adult lives soon enough. But to have an adult life — or the adolescent, playing-at-adult-life existence one leads in college — and then to suddenly have it ripped from me was an injury I could hardly bear. Sex was the main sticking point, and ultimately my means of escape.
One night, after I'd exhausted the job listings in my field and in my target city, I wandered over to the personals. I answered an ad from a self-described "alcoholic nerd" 400 miles away, and when I was called to a job interview in his city, we arranged to meet. We kissed haphazardly on the porch of the house where I was staying. And that was it. But it was enough. I wanted more. I'd been planning my escape from my parents' house for months, but at that moment I said to hell with savings. I didn't get the job I interviewed for that weekend, so I said to hell with that too. I gave notice, packed all my belongings into my Tempo, and drove away.
The alcoholic nerd, it turned out, had advertised himself too honestly. So I moved on. Portland's a demi-paradise for sex-starved geek girls. I ordered the geek-guy appetizer tray. To the most recent of these, a guest at a friend's party, I simply stood up and said, "Come upstairs with me." He followed. He's been around for a year.
Sometimes I have dinner with an old college roommate and listen to hear complain about how tough it is to meet men in this city. All I can do is shake my head and tell her she doesn't know how good she has it.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Christen McCurdy is a freelance writer living in Portland, Oregon.
She's working on a novel whose protagonist blogs at
sheilacarver.fictionsuit.com. |
©2007 Christen McCurdy and Nerve.com |
