Awkward, funny story.
I moved out of my mom's house this summer. The summer that I lost my virginity. (The two are unrelated to each other, but are independently related to the story). So I cleaned up my entire room and packed everything up except for the furniture.
I'm a guy, so natrually I cram stuff under the bed. Pencils, socks, stuff like that. So my mom has the mover guys come to the house to take all the furniture out. She informs me on the phone that my room is an absolute mess and I need to clean it up. I return to the house to collect what I need to. It's an empty room aside from one lamp on the floor and a wastebasket. In the middle of my room, a perfect rectangle of doghair outlines where my bed used to be. Scattered around that space are a few socks, some coins, a few pencils, some gum.
And an unwrapped Trojan "her pleasure" condom.
If she had previously been under the impression that my "close friend" Olivia and I were just "watching movies" in my room that entire time, she wasn't anymore. And I guess she let me off the hook by never confronting me about it, but the fact that she and (by proxy) my grandmother know about it but haven't said a word about it to me makes me so insanely uncomfortable. I was raised Catholic, so when we did talk about sex, it was within the context of "never have it until you're married." But by the time I hit adolescence, my mom was so wrapped up in job/divorce/selling the house/cancer treatment that she never really talked to me about what I was going through. How could I expect her to? She's been through a lot.
It's created this really uncomfortable distance between us, and I have no intentions of talking to her about sex any time soon. Sometimes I wonder which is worse: Having aggression and tension with your parents that's always in your face and expressed with shouting matches and violence? Or the cold, sterile, awkwardness that comes when your parents internalize everything and never communicate with their kids on an emotional level at all?