What I learned from working at a sex shop with my mom

Like many kids, I moved back home after university. In return, my mom asked me to help out in the family business — but this was no dry cleaner or convenience store: My family's business was a sex shop.

I was horrified. Talking about sex in front of Mom would be difficult for anyone, but I was a card-carrying prude. It's not like I was a virgin — actually, I was newly engaged — I just thought sex, with all its sweat, panting and disorientation, was best left unexamined. I had no excuses, though: Mom was working double shifts, and I didn't have a job. Duty called.

To ease myself into the world of full carnal disclosure, I sat in on a G-spot seminar my mom hosted in the store. I was the second to arrive. A thin grandma type was perched on a crushed velvet settee, seemingly determined to ignore the five-foot-tall blown-up diagram of a vagina hanging in front of her. Another prude! I thought. I sat down beside her, picked a dust bunny off my skirt and gave her a tight-lipped "Hi." She nodded and we watched silently as the room filled up with boisterous women who shared stories and became instant friends. They turned my mom's lecture into what I can only describe as the world's most obscene Tupperware party. In these women's minds, lube was just a practical as butter dishes. I widened my eyes at my neighbour. She stiffened.

Later, as we locked up the store, I asked my mom if talking so matter-of-factly about the mechanics of sex didn't make it, well, gross. "Oh honey," she said. "Sex is the most natural thing in the world."

She hadn't always been so open. As a child, while the babysitter watched TV, I rifled through my parents' "forbidden drawer" and made inedible cakes from the creams and gels I found. If any of these things had names, I never uttered them. Sex was a mystery to be solved alone, and I liked it that way.

But by the time I got to high school, Mom started talking about sex — a lot. Her stern and modest father died, she discovered women's lib, and my sisters and I hit puberty. During carpools she crammed our minivan with teenagers and yelled, "Who's having sex?" While my friends burst into hysterical giggles, asked endless questions and learned about contraception, masturbation and STDs, I plugged my ears and refused to listen.

A few days after I began my summer job, my straitlaced settee companion returned to the shop. I asked if she needed help, and she shook her head. Then my mom asked, and she burst forth in confession: She and her husband barely had sex. Intercourse had become painful after menopause, and they had ignored the issue for a decade. Mom beamed. "I get this all the time," she said. "You're just not lubricated enough!" She filled the woman's arms with bottles of lube, a teddy and a novelty apron.

Over the next few months, I realized talking about sex is difficult for my mom, too. Some customers ask blunt questions about her own sex life, which she slyly evades. One woman started a campaign to close the shop, apparently concerned my mom was corrupting the local high school kids. But she carries on, convinced there are other women silently suffering, like her post-menopausal convert.

I'd like to say that my time working at the store transformed me into a sexual amazon; that my mom and I tumbled in every morning exchanging high-fives and play-by-plays from the night before. The truth is, I never got comfortable answering questions, and I still have trouble with the word clitoris. But I know that when sex becomes more difficult, I won't wait 10 years before piping up. I will march bravely into a sex shop and ask for help — as if it's the most natural thing in the world.