My parents rarely talked to me about sex, but without direct conversations, I absorbed the idea that people who have sex outside of marriage are immoral. (My parents were not particularly religious, by the way, and they were politically liberal.)

I started doing quasi-sexual things when I was 17 and a senior in high school, but I didn’t actually have intercourse until I was 20 and a college graduate. I would have died before telling my parents. I was in a committed relationship and we responsibly prevented pregnancy and STD’s. The relationship didn’t work out. For years, I hated myself for having premarital sex and I believed my parents would be very angry if they found out. I now think they were probably trying to protect me, not trying to make me hate myself.

I definitely plan to enroll my daughter in the UUA’s Our Whole Lives program, of which my husband is a certified teacher. And I plan to leave books such as It’s Perfectly Normal lying around the house, and I plan to make it clear that it’s O.K. to be curious about sex and to want real answers to real questions (as opposed to my mom’s “God puts the baby in the mommy’s tummy through a special zipper”). When she’s a teenager, I want to tell her that sexual feelings are natural and good and that there are safe, responsible ways to express them.