The oldest boy is going to be 13 this year. He hasn’t hit The Change yet as far as I can tell, and as the product years of many years of Catholic socio-emotional sexophobic repression, I may never actually know. Definitive confirmation would require direct asking, which is something we’re trained by the church specifically not to do. This is the same organization that brought you the concepts of “impure thought” and “the occasion of sin.” Immorality begins at the conception of the idea. There are prophylactics in place, of course. I like to think of confession as a spiritual “morning-after pill,” if you will, preventing the zygote of corruption from hatching into the blastocyst of wicked deed, but somehow I doubt the metaphor will make it into the official church brochures.

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