My mother was a single mother for the most part, and so the requisite “sex talk” fell exclusively to her. I’m not sure what version my younger brother got — he didn’t seem to need much instruction in that area — but the version I got has stayed with me.

“Whatever you do,” she whispered over my brother’s electric guitar playing in the next room, “Never, ever have sex without a condom. N-e-v-e-r. Unless you are trying to get pregnant.”

It was New York City in the early 1990s. I couldn’t have been more than 15 — an age that now seems ancient for the sex talk, considering the pregnancy rate among middle schoolers these days. But at the time, I was emotionally and socially about 12 so the timing worked out great for me. I was a sophomore at High School for the Performing Arts, a recent transplant from the Jersey suburbs — a singing, chain smoking book nerd whose Saturday nights usually involved hunting for Allen Ginsberg in the West Village, alone.

In other words, I wasn’t exactly fighting off the boys.

My mother’s advice was heavily influenced by the fact she’d spent the last decade saying goodbye to countless friends and colleagues who’d died or were dying of AIDS. She worked in the fashion and entertainment industry, and “Safe Sex” was the mantra of the day — she was doing her best to pass the message on to me.

My mother was raised Catholic, so I can only imagine that talking freely about sexuality was about as comfortable for her as an appendicitis. She’d long since left religion behind, but her morality was innate and she passed it on, for the most part, to me. She was trying to protect a perceived threat to my life. In matters of war, morality takes a back seat to self-preservation, and sexuality in New York City in the early 1990s was a battleground.

Looking back on that awkward talk, I’m filled compassion for my mother, but at the time I was embarrassed by it. I shushed her and shrugged it off. I didn’t think I’d much need her advice. But what I didn’t account for was the growing up I would do in college, and the fact that my awkwardness would soon cease to protect me from having to make decisions about sex.

Suddenly, I had dates. Boys liked me. How would I handle that?

The short answer is not well. By my mid-twenties I’d had a few truly reckless years, years I never would’ve dared imagine I was capable of as a teenager. Loose in New York as a college grad, I circled the drain. Without the construct of school to prop me up and provide me with a system for self-evaluation — I was adrift. I used relationships to define my worth. I settled for sex instead of intimacy and was heartbroken when my partner failed to cherish me, failed to love me.

My sexual relationships were always physically “safe,” I’d kept my mother’s advice close at hand. But emotionally, they were killing me.

Giving Up Boys

My journey with God started with a six month, self imposed “Man Fast.” I didn’t date boys, call boys, or even flirt with boys. No eye contact on the subway, no coffees with potential beaus — nothing. I needed to clear my head and try to figure out who I was — who God had made me to be — apart from my desirability as a sexual partner for someone.

That “Man Fast” was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It made me realize my addiction to attention from the opposite sex. It made me realize I’d come to depend upon those second glances, those approving eyes, for a cheap jolt of confidence.

It was a toxic system, and it took the full six months to even begin to detox. The “Man Fast” made room in my mind for a version of myself that came from somewhere deeper, somewhere authentic.

Though I am proud of my story and my journey I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, least of all my daughter. She’s only 6 now, but the day of the “sex talk” is coming, I know it. What parts of my story do I blur out, slap a PG-13 rating on, or just gloss over? Should I portray myself as celibate, as pious, when I was anything but?

Does telling our kid’s the truth about our past give them permission to make the same mistakes we made? Or does it give them a chance to see us — and hopefully themselves — as human, flawed and in need of a Savior?

Recently, I caved and watched the first few episodes of Glee on Netflix. I’m a closet musical theater nerd (read: High School for the Performing Arts) so I was in tears by the second ensemble number. But what struck me more than the campy song and dance routines was the “Celibacy Club,” scene where Rachel, the nerdy heroine, confronts the pseudo-religious cheerleaders with a speech about sex:

“Most studies show that celibacy doesn’t work in high schools! Our hormones are driving us too crazy to abstain . . . The only way to deal with teen sexuality is to be prepared. That’s what contraception is for!”

“Don’t you dare mention the C word!” hisses Quinn, the evil cheerleader and president of the “Celibacy Club.”

That scene perfectly portrays the tense place I find myself in these days in relation to the dual cultures I inhabit and their contradictory views of sexuality.

While practically I’m with Rachel, I also get the celibacy thing. The Church tows the abstinence line and for good reason. It’s in the Bible after all; 1 Peter 2:11 calls for abstinence from the “passions of the flesh” that “wage war against the soul.” That war is real and I’ve been on the front lines of it. Who hasn’t?

I’ve come to understand sex as a generative act — it always creates, it always generates something. Within the safety of marriage it generates, intimacy, trust, passion and possibly a family. Without marriage, trust, relationship — the framework most Christians would argue sex was designed for — sex generates insecurity, doubt, disappointment. Or it can generate an unplanned pregnancy, or a sexually transmitted disease.

But knowing this is not enough to keep most young people celibate. And most college freshman, or even high school students aren’t ready — nor should they be ready — for marriage. So the work of negotiating desire becomes explosive.

How can we send our kid’s into that battle unprepared?

I can’t help but think that preaching abstinence isn’t enough.

Kids raised in the church often enter adolescence with a debilitating lack of knowledge about sexuality, which can render them truly vulnerable. I recently learned of a teenager who contracted HIV from a heterosexual encounter in a small Texas town. That same teenager grew up in a hyper conservative religious household where I can bet safe sex was not a topic of dinner conversation.

HIV and AIDS is as real in rural Texas as it was in New York City in the 1990s. Ignoring it won’t make it go away.

Today I give a big heap of thanks that my daughter’s only in first grade, and I have some time — and a wonderful husband — to work through this all with. Those are two advantages my own mother didn’t have. Time and prayer and I hope good, honest conversations with fellow parents will help me to at least not make it harder for my daughter.

But then the real work begins — the work of trusting God with my child, trusting God with the safety and well being of the most precious human being in the world to me. Trusting that though I likely will get the “sex talk” wrong, He can guide her in ways that I cannot. Amen.

Cameron Dezen Hammon writes the blog Hipster Christian Housewife.