The Appointed Hour

Many an adult who grew up in the England
of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s will remember
how parenting was presented. What it meant.
The virtue of the gender based division of labour,
which soon turned into the inequality of reward. 
The male absenteeism from the home,
where the mother waited up, not knowing
how sober their husband would be
until he rolled up, the pub closed.

Much less dare she speculate
on the money he spent when there
and where that money might have gone
to improve the home he came back to.

But all that was there for any stranger to read,
were they ever allowed to see the household
and the family at their most honestly messy.

All this would be tidied away from the child
before the hour, appointed by the mother,
where after a dozen years of the parents
stalling all talk of conception and birth
with 'Babies come from under gooseberry bushes',
the reckoning has arrived for 'becoming an adult'.

With the child quietly sat down
the mother starts to bluff her way
past all the years of playground-led
slang-laden misinformation about sex
that she can no more describe than override
using the text in the book of line drawings
about 'how bodies work' that she quotes from,
to make herself sound authoritative and scientific.

The battle is over before it is begun.

The child knows that when they have to be still to listen,
they won't be listened to, they have nothing more
to offer than rigged assent to 'the conversation',
where the mother knows that she has to hide
all the unnamed links between sex, shame,
wanting, and the consequential financial debt,
which, if well explained, would make celibacy for life
seem like common sense, were it manageable. 

But the mother says what she says to encourage the child to marry.....