We really need to talk about condoms...

Time for <i>that</i> talk? Photo / APN

When I was a teenager, boys my age were about as attractive as homework. I wanted to get romantic with one of them about as much as I wanted to rub pimply chin pustules with them. Which, let's be honest, amounts to about the same thing.

So when my own sweet angel started stretching and moping and emerged from his room a 187cm drainpipe of adolescent pungency, the issue of girls - the sort that stay overnight at least-hadn't really entered my consciousness.

He couldn't vacuum. He couldn't even wash the dishes properly, what on earth would girls see in him? So I was caught off guard last year when, at the age of 17, the girlfriend came to stay.

Not that I had much choice. They'd been buried in his fetid room for a few hours and I checked in to see if she wanted the usual 10pm lift home, nervously peeking around the door after some loud fumbling to herald my entrance, where upon the little lovebirds announced, in complete businesslike connivance, that she was staying the night. "Okay?"

"Um, has Clarissa asked her parents?" I said feebly. "Yes," came the response. Okay, great! So it's their decision not mine. "Well, I guess that's okay then," trying my best to appear completely unfazed. Then I slunk back out to the lounge.

Halfway down the hall I realised I had been ambushed. Hang on a minute. I reversed back into the bedroom. "So, Clarissa, do they know where you are planning on sleeping?"

"I'm not sure," Clarissa, 17, said smugly. Which of course meant they imagined her in a single bed at the other end of the house with a picture of a 1950s virgin in soft focus praying above it.

But it was too late. I'd already agreed. I knew where she was intending to sleep and I'd sanctioned it. They'd got me.

Who really knows what went on that night? But two weeks later and months too late I realised we needed to have the condom conversation.

Suddenly I had no idea how to talk sex with this boy I'd raised to be completely comfortable talking about vaginas and penises and the consequences of them uniting.

But now we were talking about his bits and pieces and it was all, like, yuck!

"Here," I said, thrusting at him a brown paper bag with a packet of 12 of the most normal, unribbed, unflavoured condoms I could find at Pak'n Save. "I have no idea if you need these, but you might one day so here they are."

He took the bag and said nothing. To which I also said nothing. Then I backed out of his room.

I know what you think: If he'd been a girl, then the whole inept episode would have been handled quite differently. Probably with a few hugs, a few tears and a lot more words. And I, ashamed all the way down to my modern feminist roots, agree.

But the truth is, teenagers bring out absolute uselessness in a parent. All of a sudden these little treasures who'd dangle quite unconcernedly over the Huka Falls if you held them by the ankles, start thinking you're a fallible idiot. The relationship that was once so tight is now under threat. Or so we think. So we do dumb things in the hope of protecting it.

Should I have said, "No, you can't stay the night? At least not till we've considered this together, had a talk about commitment and emotions and properly told Clarissa's parents? Till you've both demonstrated to me how you can put a condom on a banana?" Probably.

I've learned and I'm getting better at it. Sure he's a slob and he can retain neither a list of instructions nor his liquor. But he's getting there.

Sometimes in the chaos and mess of our relationship little treasures emerge: unexpected thank yous and I love yous, requests to help with English.

Oh, and condoms, which one by one, emerged completely intact as I packed up his room when he left for a short OE recently. Well, nearly all of them.