Être parent, numéro spécial : parler de sexualité à son ado

Hier j’en entendu parler d’un documentaire de Julie Talon datant de 2019, intitulé « Préliminaires », qu’ARTE a récemment diffusé. C’est un recueil de témoignages d’ados dont on n’entend que les voix, et de jeunes adultes parlant à visage découvert de leur vécu durant leur propre adolescence, avec la perspective de seulement quelques années mais une lucidité incroyable. Le reportage livre leur perception de la sexualité et ce, dès le début du collège (c’est à dire quand ils ont entre 11 et 14 ans), comment ils y sont confrontés, et comment ils en font l’apprentissage. Le tout sans que nous, parents, le réalisions tout à fait.


Conseil à mon fils

J’ai demandé à mon fils adolescent de presque 14 ans, de prendre 50 minutes pour regarder sérieusement, et en entier, ce documentaire.

Je lui ai déjà parlé à quelques occasions de sexualité au cours des trois années passées. Il m’écoute poliment mais semble subir mes monologues même s’ils sont rares, plutôt que se sentir libre d’engager la conversation. Je ne le blâme pas. Hier, donc, je lui ai rappelé qu’il peut parler à moi et à son père, mais je lui ai aussi suggéré de partager le lien de la vidéo avec ses potes et qu’ils en parlent ensemble.

Je me dis que tout ce que j’essaie de lui faire passer comme messages sera peut-être renforcé ou mis en abîme par le biais de ce reportage.

Je lui ai également donné le conseil que j’aurais aimé avoir eu quand j’avais son âge : les premières fois c’est TOUJOURS POURRI. Alors il s’agit de pas se mettre la pression (ha ha, facile à dire avec le recul !), de bien choisir si on le peut, et puisque tout cela se fait le plus loin possible des parents et des adultes, d’éviter de se fourrer dans des situations à problèmes. Maintenant je croise les doigts pour lui qu’il s’en sorte aussi bien que possible et qu’il sache qu’il me trouvera s’il a besoin.


Mon avis, mes notes

J’ai trouvé ce reportage glaçant et émouvant, inquiétant mais rassurant à la fois, parce que ça met en avant que tous les ados sont dans le même bateau, tous désarmés, tous contraints, tous vulnérables.

Voici les notes (qui ne parleront peut-être qu’à moi) que j’ai prises en regardant le documentaire :

  • Notion de devoir, pression sociale
  • « Jouer aux grands »
  • Paradoxe de liberté / libération, mais, que pour les hétéros. « Les prélis, c’est le jeu des hétéros et la douleur des personnes queer »
  • « On peut pas juger une personne sur le physique. On le choisit pas. On naît avec. »
  • Honte, craintes, contraintes, violence, `nudesˋ, chantage, passage à l’acte
  • Codification due au porno auquel ils ont accès facilement et fréquemment. « Je l’ai fait parce qu’il fallait le faire. » « C’est les mecs qui donnent le ‘la’ »
  • C’est compliqué d’en parler, y compris aux parents.
  • Importance reconnue du consentement, mais par égoïsme ou ambiguïté certains « non » sont ignorés (point de vue masculin). Et quand on réalise là où on a mis les pieds, c’est difficile souvent de revenir en arrière (point de vue féminin).
  • « Pour porter plainte il faut être avec un adulte. »
  • « S’il m’avait respectée il aurait arrêté quand j’ai dit non, non non … J’ai accepté parce que j’avais peur. »
  • Les « prélis » ne sont pas considérés comme du « vrai sexe », mais comme du « sexe-moins », « ça engage moins, donc c’est pas très grave. »
  • Et puis cette gamine qui disait en milieu du documentaire, qu’elle avait fait une fellation parce qu’elle croyait qu’il fallait, qu’elle avait détesté et puis qu’elle avait mis deux ans avant d’en refaire tant ça l’avait dégoûtée ☹️

3615 MaVie

Premier baiser pendant l’été entre la dernière année de petite école et l’entrée au collège, lors d’un séjour linguistique en Angleterre. Première relation sexuelle à 17 ans, l’été après le baccalauréat. Et entre les deux : seulement quelques petits copains –pas beaucoup– et zéro jeux sexuels (ce que les ados d’aujourd’hui appellent « prélis ».)

De mon adolescence, celle de son père et des autres adultes de son entourage, je crois qu’on n’a rien à transposer et rien ne pourrait aider vraiment mon fils. Pour ma part je me souviens (pas très clairement) d’un livre illustré que mes parents avaient acheté, façon bande-dessinée mais avec des photos, mettant en scène une famille à différents moments de leur vie. Je me rappelle avoir feuilleté « le déclic » que j’avais trouvé dans les toilettes chez des amis de mes parents et même si je comprenais rien je me souviens très précisément devoir absolument ne PAS en parler (et je m’y suis tenue jusqu’à maintenant :D). Je me souviens vaguement qu’il y avait un film érotique à la télé sur la 5 ou la 6 tard un samedi de temps en temps, mais c’était pas possible pour mon frère et moi d’en voir car la télé était dans la chambre de mes parents. Je me souviens en souriant du matelas de mon frère qui prenait la forme d’une pyramide à mesure qu’il stockait des BDs cochonnes qui ne me fascinaient pas mais dont j’ai consulté quelques exemplaires lorsqu’il n’était pas dans sa chambre. Il n’y avait pas Internet, évidemment, jusqu’à ce que je sois déjà adulte.

Mais je ne me souviens pas d’avoir subi de pression sociale, pas de telle violence dans les attentes ou les codes de l’époque. Je me souviens assez bien qu’on disait de moi dès le collège que j’avais un « super corps mais une vilaine tête » et étonnement ça ne m’a fait ni chaud ni froid. Par contre (ou alors à cause de), je me souviens amèrement qu’à la petite école et en colonies de vacances on disait de mes tâches de rousseur qu’on m’avait « tiré dessus avec un fusil à merde à travers une passoire » (c’est bigrement précis, quand même) et comme on m’avait aussi dit que pour les faire partir il fallait se frotter le visage avec la rosée du matin, j’avais essayé et j’étais triste que ça ne marche pas.

2 years a bachelorette

Today I’ve been a bachelorette for two years. It’s a fact, not a celebration, not a commemoration, not a homage. This is not a life goal either!

Hand-made envelope of a stapled white folded sheet on which colourful patches form a heart.

I love the idea of love and am happy for those who are in a good relationship. I am not sad that this isn’t my case. In practice, I have accepted that that isn’t for me.

I have had many happy moments in all of my past relationships and I cherish those memories. I am blessed with a selective memory which ensures that I retain hardly any bitterness from the unhappy times.

There isn’t any “yet”. That is all. The anniversary was on my mind because I was reminded of that time years ago when a dear friend of mine had posited that I could never stay single. It may have been the case then, and it may have shaped what I did back then to not stay single. If it was true, it hasn’t been for a while.

Art: Toothless gulping fish (step by step)

I made a habit these last few years to hand-make my son’s birthday cards. This year I did something new: asking HIM what theme he wanted me to explore. Toothless, from the movie “How to train your dragon”, he said. Ok! I love this character: he’s in fact a cat. With scales and wings.

Grey toned paper taped with masking tape and the pencil sketch of a sitting dragon with a fish in his mouth

I started with a pencil outline on toned thick paper, the size of a postcard.

Dark blue gouache paint applied in the background

Then I mixed my Holbein Artists gouache paint: Prussian blue and ivory black and added titanium white (just a teeny bit), which I laid on the paper. I made sure to be as precise as I could

Darker blue and lighter blue applied on the dragon and where there is light on him

I mixed further my blue mix: more blue and black for the areas of the dragon that were in the shadow, and more white for the parts of the dragon that were illuminated.

Yellow paint in his eyes and on the ground around his feet

Then I used leaf green mixed with with to paint the grass underneath and his eyes.

Thinner yellow in the background to represent light rays

Here, I had a very precise idea of what I wanted to achieve and it turned out I just could not! I wanted rays of golden light falling in the background. I mixed some yellow watercolor paint (I don’t have yellow gouache) and white. And there was no way I was able to get the yellow to play well with the blue background. I had thought that once the background was dry the new layer was never going to be change by it: big mistake.

Brown and light brown added to the rocks

So I ignored the yellow rays mess, mixed a bit of black and white and painted the dark parts of the rocks. Then added more white to the mix and painted the light areas of the rocks. I used some of those mixed on the ears. I added details using black for the pupils, white to accentuate the illuminated areas.

More yellow added to darken the light rays

At this point, I had wasted both time and yellow paint 🙂 None of the strokes would produce the gradient I wanted because either the moisture of the paint turned the layers to green, or the new layer was unblended and it was going to look bad.

I covered the yellow rays after all and now the background is shades of blue

So, I returned to my early mix of blue, black and white and covered as much of the yellow rays as I could. It gave some texture to the background. I painted the bit of the fish that sticks out of the dragon’s mouth.

Masking tape removed, white lettering added to wish my son a happy 13th birthday, dated in signed.

Final result with lettering done with a white Posca pen. I hope he likes it! His birthday is next Monday.

The weirdest first day of vacation

“Yes, I’ll be working a bit on the project while I’m off because I really dig it!”

Me, massively underestimating “a bit”
In this write-up, I’m attempting the epistolary narrative style that I remember enjoying from Stephen Chbosky’s excellent novel “The perks of being a wallflower”

Dear diary, I slept in this morning \o/, got up and drank two or three cups of espresso while I lazily browsed social media and played a few games on my smartphone. I did yoga a bit before noon, showered, and got ready for the rest of my first day of vacation.

I ate a light lunch standing up in the kitchen as I was transplanting the ferns I collected last Sunday near the lake.

As I pondered which subject I was going to draw later in the day as part of Inktober, I also pondered the oddity of my Apple Watch not recongnising as “stood” the good chunk of the previous hour that I had spent, well… standing. I certainly had been “moving a little” on the account of transplanting ferns not being the kind of activity you can engage in by being immobile.

Memoji-2020-laptop

A quick time-check led me to my desk. I had just enough time to publish a press release.

I drank more espresso, took the dog out for a walk and by then I had a pretty good idea what I was going to draw. I returned to my desk again for a one-hour meeting that lasted three hours /o\ That’s the first massive underestimation of how much time to block for that project (the W3C website redesign).

My brother showed up during my call (much earlier than I anticipated) and as he didn’t have his keys he tried to FaceTime me. I rejected the call, texted him that I was in a meeting, but he responded by texting me that he was outside. So I ran downstairs to let him in, ran back up and continued with my colleagues.

Memoji-2020-shock

The doorbell rang not too long after. I apologised to my colleagues and ran downstairs and outside to pick up a delivery that I expected tomorrow. I dropped the unopened package on the dining table and as I headed back upstairs to my computer, I smiled at my brother. By then he was taking all the space on the sofa, which was fine because the cat doesn’t like the sofa that much.

My valiant colleagues and I had been at it for what seemed like days, and I was aware that each of them had other fish to fry, and yet nobody else was better positioned than them/us to do what we needed to do. Time was passing and it was food o’clock in all of our time zones.

We were done. Rather suddenly —It was the strangest thing! It seemed only moments before that we had gone through two thirds of the exercise and I was agonising (out of shame because I was getting way more of their time than was bargained for, and because my brother was waiting downstairs.)

Memoji-2020-shrug

The completion of our task took us all by surprise! As I quickly thankologised profusely to them, one of my colleagues quipped that he was almost late for second breakfast, another enquired how many breakfasts there were and whether several lunches followed and how many, and the third colleague really looked like he wanted us all to put on more work! So my finger smashed the Zoom button that ended the meeting for all.

It was 8 o’clock. I was thinking that working the equivalent of a half-day during my vacation wasn’t too bad from the point of view of my employer, and I wondered if I had missed the time before which I could still go back on how many days I was really taking.

My brother wanted me to try a particular wine that he likes very much. Opening my package made me happy: my favourite fragrance arrived in two versions: regular and “body mist.” My brother’s wine was very good, he’s right. We sipped it and ate guacamole and chips while the oven heated. I made a nice dinner that didn’t take long to prepare, and we both enjoyed it.

Soon enough we were on the sofa, me drinking espresso and him drinking tea; each talking to each other with interest, him about why some stuff changed at his workplace and me suggesting further areas of optimisation (he will at least explore one idea.) I stood up a few times and “moved a little”, as commanded by my smart watch. He doesn’t mind, he doesn’t think I’m weird.

I grabbed my art book, pencil and ink pen a bit before 11 o’clock. Today’s Inktober prompt is “sleep” and I was going to draw a newborn sleeping next to his daddy’s chest. My brother commented that the photo I used as reference was too detailed, and he may be right, but I had a good feeling about it and told him I was trying a minute or two before giving up. My feeling was indeed right, and my brother was surprised when I was finished, because I finished earlier than he anticipated, and the drawing was pretty good.

Memoji-2020-party

Eventually, my brother left. It was 2 am. We had spent a lovely evening together. It had been a nice break from work but I was keen on finishing where I left off, out of duty because of the timeline that was agreed on.

The time tracker on my computer started logging a new day at 5 am. I was done right after 6. Whew! This was the second massive underestimation of how much time to block for that project. But now the people we work with can do their part and hopefully we will all meet the deadline in two days.

As I stood at my window, sipping espresso and watching the sky going from really dark to some sort of hesitant but unmistakable glow, I observed that it’s a whole day of vacation I could have written off.