{"id":3406,"date":"2010-07-05T10:24:26","date_gmt":"2010-07-05T15:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/?p=3406"},"modified":"2010-07-05T10:24:26","modified_gmt":"2010-07-05T15:24:26","slug":"the-infamous-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/2010\/20100705-3406.htm","title":{"rendered":"The Infamous &#8220;Talk&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was 20 years old before I got &#8220;the talk&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>When I was going through puberty, my parents were still finishing up going through newborns&#8211;and somehow &#8220;the talk&#8221; escaped them.  <\/p>\n<p>They decided to do better for my brothers, so they purchased Barbara and Dennis Rainey&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shopfamilylife.com\/passport-2-purity.html\" target=\"_blank\">Passport 2 Purity<\/a> weekend retreat kit and Dad started preparing for a guys weekend retreat.<\/p>\n<p>They rented a cabin at one of our state parks and purchased massive amounts of meat and &#8220;bellywash&#8221; (soda).  And they headed off for a weekend of manly pursuits (fire building, mountain biking, and copious amounts of meat.)  <\/p>\n<p>And, of course, they had &#8220;the talk&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Joshua and Daniel got theirs.  John and Timothy got theirs.<\/p>\n<p>Then Mom started talking of preparing for Grace&#8217;s weekend retreat and Anna and I got jealous.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t fair, we said.  We&#8217;d never gotten &#8220;the talk&#8221;.  We&#8217;d never enjoyed a weekend retreat with our mother, doing girlie things.  We&#8217;d never listened to the Rainey audio-cassette tapes that my brothers rolled their eyes and shook their heads at.<\/p>\n<p>So at last, when I was 20 years old, my parents decided to backtrack.  They&#8217;d do the right thing by their eldest daughters.  They&#8217;d give us &#8220;the talk.&#8221;  Better late than never, right?<\/p>\n<p>We got a hotel room at a hotel with a pool.  We ate Macaroni Grill for dinner.  We explored craft boutiques during the day and had lunch at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.greengateau.com\/ordereze\/Content\/10\/Summary.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">The Green Gateau<\/a>, a fancy little Lincoln restaurant.  And when we weren&#8217;t doing other things, we listened to the Raineys talk about purity. <\/p>\n<p>Not surprisingly, &#8220;the talk&#8221; was geared towards a younger audience.  The content was good, but nothing we hadn&#8217;t managed to discuss already in much less formal conversations.  The official &#8220;birds and the bees&#8221; segment passed so quickly that we had to stop and comment to each other.  &#8220;Was that it?  Was that all they were going to say about the mechanics?&#8221;  Apparently so.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, &#8220;the talk&#8221; was a bit belated&#8211;and therefore rather comical.<\/p>\n<p>But we came away from our weekend talk having joined the fraternity of Passport 2 Purity graduates, proudly bearing our badge of membership: a musical rendition of Colossians 1:18.<\/p>\n<p>Now all the Menter children can proudly sing:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;He is also head of the body, the church.  And He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself may come to have first place in everything&#8230;&#8221; YE-AH-AH<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And sing it we do, whether needling one another with a &#8220;private&#8221; reminder of the weekends we shared or enjoying a moment of family togetherness around the Fourth of July dinner table.<\/p>\n<p>Ah, fond memories of &#8220;the talk&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was 20 years old before I got &#8220;the talk&#8221;. When I was going through puberty, my parents were still finishing up going through newborns&#8211;and somehow &#8220;the talk&#8221; escaped them. They decided to do better for my brothers, so they purchased Barbara and Dennis Rainey&#8217;s Passport 2 Purity weekend retreat kit and Dad started preparing &#8230; <a title=\"The Infamous &#8220;Talk&#8221;\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/2010\/20100705-3406.htm\">Read more <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Infamous &#8220;Talk&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3406"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}