I am a sexual educator because of my mother.

My mother is a complicated person. For a long time, I have had two relationships with her. One relationship as parent and child and the other as two women who respect each other. The first relationship is complicated and dark, the second, while also complicated, is inspirational. This is about the second relationship.

Perhaps some cultural context is necessary to understand her. She grew up in a tiny little mountain town as the daughter of two government college professors. She likes to tell me that her world was very small, she uses the Hindi word "*daira*" which roughly translated means the extent of the realm of one's existence, the extent of their exposure, and that hers was very narrow. While growing up she had little interest in boys, love or relationships, she mainly enjoyed going to the forest with her radio, listening to music, drinking beer with her dad and dancing. She married the third man she met. She didn't meet him in a bar or in college, she met him at a meeting set up for the explicit purpose of marriage and she chose him because he had a VCR at home and she thought she would watch movies all day. I tell that story about my mom often, because it breaks your heart in the most beautiful of ways, especially since the cultural reality of marriage in India is so harsh.

My mother was basically recruited by my father to be a professional wife. He had a high-profile job and needed a hostess, who could be taught to be sophisticated but not so enlightened she wouldn't still serve his family and him. She knew very little about sex until she got married and when she had it for the first time, she was horrified.

Why do I know this?

She told me.

My mother started talking to me about sex when I was very young but the conversation rarely focused on condoms, PIV or STIs. Quite frankly, she didn't know enough to teach me, I taught a lot of it to her, later. Where would she have learnt it? She talked to me about sex in experiential terms. Not about the physical experience of it as much as the social experience of it. One of the earliest conversations we had about sex for which I have lucid memories was about compatibility.

"We got no choice, A," she said, "A man was chosen for us and sex with him was what we got forever, we were not taught to ask for things or even check for them but you have a choice, sexual compatibility is important in a relationship. We don't talk about it but it's very important."

My mother abused me as a person, but as a woman, she empowered the fuck out of me. She didn't, not once, tell me not to have sex, not to have it outside of marriage, to have it with only one person or to do it as duty. Over the years, she continued to talk to me about sex. When I started having it, I started talking back, and they were never the kind of conversations you would expect. They were always conversations about how the social context within which we were exploring our individual sexualities was so different. It taught me to view sex quite deeply. It also taught me that one can know a lot of details, have a really wide *daira*, but experience entails many other factors. Primarily, what will you do with yours?

My mother took her sexual experience, and the lack of it, and decided she was correcting this for her daughters. She opened the door for us to sexuality as acceptable. She encouraged us to make choices, within it, that prioritised *us*, not man-favouring cultural convention. She talked to us about the good, bad and ugly parts of sex and sexuality and she did it with comedic nonchalance. She didn't conceptualise it to me, she just shared it with me. She didn't turn it into moral lessons, she just left it there for me to think about. Stories of body obscurity, shame, sex with strangers you married, the danger of the lack of experience were told to me routinely.

As I got older, I had more and more things to teach her and she started to bring her friends around to discuss things with me as well. It was just an accidental and beautiful space that was created, one where women, could talk about their experiences with sex. Not quite how I talk to my friends because we all have a lot more exposure than they did, most of them had had one partner, their husband, for life, and there were so many things they didn't know where to go to ask.

I have explained to a woman twice my age that doing it from behind doesn't necessarily mean anal. I taught my mother about and bought her lube for the first time. They told me about their secret soujourns into their husbands' porn magazines. They asked about how one can ask a partner you've already been with for two decades for your first orgasm.

They chose to ask me because my mothers comfort with the subject around her daughter was so high that she projected it onto a slice of society that was taught never to discuss these things. These grown women who taught me how to vote, operate bank accounts, navigate sexual harassment, understand cultural oppression, were asking me, a very young adult, for sexual insight because they wanted the benefit of the experience (multiple partners, openness and directness) that they did not have the privilege to access. It wasn't a thrill-based space to discuss sex and I am not sure I can adequately explain how, culturally, discussing sex while acknowledging the sexual experience of a 21-year old unmarried woman without condemnation or morality was practically utopian for the time. They really wanted to know and they really provided me with socio-cultural insight that helped me understand sexuality and sex as a socio-political concept. They didn't know what they were doing for me, heck, I didn't even know what I was doing for them.

But today, I know.

My mother's behaviour often seems inappropriate to people when I tell it in stories. Like her long discussion earlier this evening about whether the fact that my sister's fiancé is 6 feet tall and built means he also has a huge penis. It's not inappropriate. She doesn't know and she knows her daughter knows so wanted to ask. It is that kind of open question-askinh which she then supplements with information about her experience and her lack of it that has been invaluable in teaching me how complex sexuality and the politics of sexual "knowledge" are.

I am a sexual educator because of my mother. It's because she exposed me to a space where I could see, so clearly, that sexuality exists in many realms outside of the moral. We can get hung up on many things, but she exposed her life experience to me with trust that I would parse it for knowledge and use it well. She has had many struggles over the years in understanding my sexuality. For the girl she was, understanding the breadth of my sexuality has been difficult, but she did do it. It took decades but she did it. Not in the way that she wants to hear about me getting beaten or fucked, but in the way that she'll ask me how two women have sex or why one may desire pain. She wants to learn. Always. That's what she taught me. It is invaluable.

And I won't lie, often, inappropriate.