When I was about seven or eight, I asked my mother that age-old question: Where do babies come from? She told me that they come from God. All a married couple had to do was pray really, really hard. God made sure they were married, and then he granted their prayer. Emphasis on married. This wasn’t as silly as blaming the stork, and for a good couple of years, I really did think it was God’s doing when people got pregnant.

After I got older, my mother was much more open. I used to watch TV in her room, and when she wanted me out, she’d just tell me to get out because she and my dad wanted to have sex. Obviously, I would get out of there immediately and proceed to rant about how much therapy I was going to need because she said that.

My junior year, I had a class called Christian Morality. (I go to a Catholic school, so religion is required.) The religion book raved about how sex was a sacrament only for married couples, and my teacher explained that if we lose that sacrament before marriage then we have less love to give our spouses. Half the people in my grade probably aren’t virgins. For my teacher to say this about the “sacrament” of sex and think people weren’t rolling their eyes or doodling in their notebooks was ridiculous.

I wish I could have gotten the straight-up facts about sex and not simply focused on where the vagina, the vas deferens and the scrotum all are. Instead of preaching abstinence and showing us pictures of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), I wish that we could get some real information about how to prevent STDs, if we chose to have sex. Open, honest answers without any judgment would have been nice.

Want to read more stories from Sex, Etc. teen editors about talking to parents about sex and what they wish they'd learned in sex ed? Check out Chelsea, Yannick, and Joshua's stories.