one of the larger parental debates between marty and i has revolved around bella and sex. marty's for it, and i'm against it. let me clarify that a bit. marty's open to that journey beginning in high school, and i think it has less to do with someone's age and more to do with their maturity or state of readiness if you will. marty's core argument, "what, you want to send your daughter to college without having ever kissed a boy?"

my response, "if she's not ready or interested in taking that step in high school, then yes, i'm perfectly comfortable sending my daughter to college without ever having kissed a boy."

ok. now here's the thing. bella likes boys. like quite a bit. and has for a good five or more years now. she popped on the early side as far as noticing who was cute and all of that. but when it came to the physicality of it all, she just wasn't feeling it then and she, at the time of this writing, isn't feeling it now.

being marty's daughter, bella has had no issues expressing this position to any suitors. those conversations tended to go a bit like this:

BOY
hey bella. so i was wondering if you might like to, you know, hang out more and maybe try our hand at dating.

BELLA
uhh. yeah. sure. that sounds great.

BOY
oh. awesome.

BELLA
but i need to tell you that i'm not really interested in kissing and all that. so that might not be part of it, at the start at least. i mean we'll see, but i just want you to know that i'm not there yet.

BOY
oh. well. of course. we can go slow.

and slow it went. i mean sure, the boys had moves and motives. but so did bella. the one i saw most often: the boy comes over to watch tv. bella and the boy sit on the living room couch watching tv. bella knitting (as she pretty much always is), boy sitting by her side. in time the boy will inch closer. then a bit closer. when their proximity exceeds bella's comfort level, she will take a moment to study her knitting progress, holding up the work before her and stretching the piece this way and that. as she lowers the work back to her lap, she will pull a fresh line of string from the basketball-sized ball of yarn she's working from and re-situate everything, and before the boy knows what happened, there will be a big-ass orb of yarn sitting between he and bella or squarely planted in his lap. i've yet to see a guy look sexy with a giant ball of pink yarn on his lap.

i love my girl and her ways.

admittedly marty is a little perplexed by the lack of progress here. she finds in not normal. unnatural even. i explain to her that in her experience, yes, this is not how it went down. but and this is one of those big 'buts', not all high schoolers have matured at the same clip. nor are all high schoolers equipped in the same manner for life's next steps. all of this is quite glaring and obvious in junior high. here you have a mix of kids that are about to go through puberty, are going through puberty, or have gone through puberty (there was a kid at alex's middle school graduation that had more facial hair than i can grow). in high school, virtually everyone is on the other side of that fence, but it doesn't necessarily mean they are comfortably or equally so. this is the part marty had problems understanding. it was much easier for me because i was for sure one of those kids getting lapped on the track in that particular race.

in high school (and college even) i marveled, many times, at what i saw around me. and there wasn't a time that this happened where i didn't hide my reaction with the poise of a Shakespearian-trained actor. were these people insane? and how'd they even know what to do? you gotta remember this was pre-internet making me part of that generation that had sex before seeing other people have sex (see 'buck-wild').

but here's what i didn't know. i was not alone. others had my same reaction and fear. but those others also had these shakespeare-grade acting tools because not having them in this world meant being cast to the social winds which are both merciless and relentless. the saddest cases were always the boys and girls who lacked the sufficient grace and tools to evade that ginormous wave of fumbling and adolescent lust, desire, judgement, and pressure which, again, proved merciless and relentless. thankfully - and i've never used the word thankfully in a truer and more heartfelt way than this moment here - thankfully, marty taught bella to advocate for herself. to speak her mind. and not allow her self to be bullied and manipulated. and this she does. and every boy who has gotten to this spot with bella has thought the same thing, 'this time will be different.' and so far, again thankfully, all they got, in the end, was a bright-colored ball of yarn on their distended lap. in time, the boy's patience wanes and they move onto easier hunting grounds.

i tell marty it will happen. but it needs to happen when the child is ready for it to happen. it admittedly did take me a while to have a response to marty's concern of sending bella off to college before even getting her first kiss. i read tom wolfe's, I am Charlotte Simmons about a too-innocent girl's unprepared entry into the college scene, and that left me not wishful but DESPERATE to do everything possible to equip my daughter for life away from her home and the natural safety net it provides.

but in time the words came. i told marty that we have to send our daughter into the world inexperienced in many parts of adulthood, it can't be helped. what we don't want to do is to send her out there naive to the world she is walking into to. sheltered. cloistered. uninformed. blanketed. we need her to know the score and have the tools to decide the hows and the whats, and very importantly, the whens of the choices that will inevitably come before her.

marty does have sound reasoning too though. she wants some things to happen to bella when she is still at home and has her family to counsel and console her and yes to even hold her while she goes to sleep if need be. there are some things, like getting your heart broken for the first time, that should happen while the child is still living at home and not when she's off in some foreign state with nary a friend or confidant within hugs reach.

now to round this picture of bella out a bit. does she get caught up in friend drama, and text too much and sleep too little? yes. she does all of those things and more. but i've never met someone who has met bella who has said her head is in the clouds, or she is clueless, or she can't advocate for herself. she's getting a good handle on the game, and she is getting a good handle on herself. in the end isn't that what it's all about? isn't that what we're all doing, whether we're doing it at 17, 37 and 57? figuring it out and figuring ourselves out. this too is an endless pursuit and one we all must come to at our own pace and grace.