A Lesson On S(elf-love)EX
- Jena L. Manning
- May 18, 2023
- 5 min read
The following story is part of my collection of personal essays called The Menial Stories of a 21-Year-Old. It portrays my own interpretation of how events have played out in my life— take it as you will.
When Mrs. Lewars yelled out, “SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX!,” at the beginning of our first sexual education class at Pembroke Pines Charter Elementary, the tiny classroom that held around 50 of us squirmy, jittery 8-year-old girls erupted into a rush of high-pitched giggles and amused whispers. There’s noooooo way she just said that out loud to us third graders! I glanced at my two best friends, Natalie and Alai, girls whom I am still in close contact with today, and our shared smirks made me laugh even harder.
But Mrs. Lewars kept going! “SEX! SEX! SEX!” she cried, with the strenuous effort of her entire frail, slender body and small set of lungs. I don’t know how many times she said the forbidden word S-E-X that day, but I remember beginning to say it out loud after her. “Sex, sex, sex,” I repeated to Natalie and Alai. They replied, “Sex, sex, sex.” I cackled again and again. I knew that this sexual education class was going to be the highlight of my week, and it was only Monday.
Once the room quieted down after what felt like a millennium, Mrs. Lewars smiled sweetly at her third grade crowd and gently announced, “Now, we can begin our lesson without any giggles at the word…sex.” She paused and looked around for any strays of laughter. There was one more quiet snicker on the other side of the classroom. Our lesson then began.
I can still recall all of my “Oh, really?” and “No way!” moments of realization during Mrs. Lewars’s sexual education class because my third-grader self had really paid attention. My curious 8-year-old brain didn’t know the ins and outs of sex and love, and it was about time that the adults were going to tell me about all that interesting PG-13 stuff. I remember learning more about other forbidden words: penis (a boy’s pee-pee), testicles (balls), vagina (a girl’s pee-pee), breasts (boobies). I remember being surprised when I found out that boys may start to think more sexually than girls at an early age (a couple of boy-crazed classmates around me had obnoxiously guffawed at that fact). And I remember discovering what sex actually was when Mrs. Lewars walked us through the whole intercourse procedure, step by step.
But what truly sticks with me from Mrs. Lewars’s steamy-enough-for-8-year-old-girls class was not sex and love and the safety of sex and love, but her 5-minute bit about self-love at the end of the lesson. She wanted to ensure that us little women would consider loving ourselves before giving our all to someone else. “It’s important to know your worth,” she said at the conclusion of the lesson, “so that you can make sure others know it too.” Mrs. Lewars scanned the room with her steady kind eyes, and for a moment she looked at me. I felt seen and beautiful. I walked out of that classroom with my insides warmer than they ever were.
But what truly sticks with me from Mrs. Lewars's steamy-enough-for-8-year-old-girls was not sex and love and the safety of sex and love, but her 5-minute bit about self-love at the end of the lesson.
You see, Mrs. Lewars was a Black woman, like me, and when she talked about self-love, I felt her love too. She talked about loving her natural volumized hair and the way it uncontrollably frizzed up underneath our South Florida sun. She talked about appreciating her coffee brown body. She talked about how she could dance crazy to her family’s “Black music” without a care in the world. I was certain that she would’ve loved my hair, appreciated my body, and danced at my Jamaican family’s lively reggae and dancehall parties too.
In less than ten minutes, I’d say that Mrs. Lewars did a better job of showing me self-love than my mother ever could. After all, I grew up with a Chinese-passing Jamaican mother who could never explicitly demonstrate to me what it means to be a proud Black woman. She’d often tell me that I am beautiful and that I am pretty and that I am worthy, but her words only spouted out half full into my ears. How could she admire her brown frizz-haired daughter who doesn’t look like her at all? I wanted her straighter, easy-to-manage hair, and I wanted to be tinier like her. I wanted her lighter yellow skin and her narrower face structure. I wanted to be more like her, not me.
Mrs. Lewars reassured me about the things I never even knew to think about— why my tight coiled curls are okay as they are, why I should love to wear my caramel skin, why my chubby cheeks and overall bigger body size are simply works of art and nothing to fret over, why I am enough as I am. “Let’s embrace all that we are,” she said. “No one’s got it like us.” Because Mrs. Lewars was so cool and happy with herself, I pictured for the first time what it would mean to be cool and happy with myself.
Mrs. Lewars reassured me about the things I never even knew to think about— why my tight coiled curls are okay as they are, why I should love to wear my caramel skin...why I am enough as I am.
These days, I wear my thick curly hair out, and I let it become bigger and fluffier under these humid Floridian conditions. I wear crop tops and short shorts, despite any flaps and folds. I sunbathe on Miami’s hot beaches and allow my skin to become even browner. I whine and sing to the energetic rhythms of Jamaican and African dancehall.
I do all these things, but sometimes, there lingers a sense of ugliness within my insides and on my outsides. Sometimes I feel that my puffed-out hair has no shape. Sometimes I feel too flabby on my sides to wear my favorite red cotton tube top. Sometimes I feel brown enough, and I don’t want to join my friends at the beach to tan even more. Sometimes I feel like a sensory overload for other people who don’t whine and sing at parties.
I can’t always love myself, and honestly it has been especially difficult to do so during my teen years. At 14, I had a knee surgery that redefined my identity of being the strong, relentless football center-back who always starts at games. At 17, I began a two-year battle with atypical anorexia, enduring a toxic relationship with food and exercise. Maybe Mrs. Lewars had a continuum of self-love struggles herself, too. But that’s okay. We’re in a forever-and-after intimate relationship with ourselves, and it’s natural for us to sometimes get sick and tired of the ways that we look, do, act.
It’s really up to us to try (or rather, fake it ‘till we make it) to fully love ourselves, with our own little quirky features and big cultural differences, because we are stuck with being who we are. And for that realization from your 5-minute life lesson, I thank you, Mrs. Lewars.
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