Hello, you sent you ball of Stardust.

Welcome to Struggle Care, the podcast about mental health by me, Casey Davis.

Eventually, I'll have a tagline that sticks.

Also, by the way, I, somebody told me way early on that I don't pronounce sentient correctly. And I looked it up and they were correct.

So apparently the American pronunciation is sentient. I guess the British still say sentient.

But I just want, dear listener, you to know that I am totally 100% aware that I don't pronounce

it at the correct U.S. pronunciation. And I will not be. I think it sounds weird and I will not.

I want to stick with sentient. My guest today is Rachel, who is a therapist. I met her on TikTok because she makes

really incredible content about sex education for children. And before you swipe away, if you're

not a parent, we're only going to talk about parenting stuff at the very end because I want to talk more about what the effect is as adults when we don't get comprehensive sex education. So Rachel, say hello. Introduce yourself.

Hi, everybody. I'm Rachel. You might also know me as Shug from TikTok. So Rachel, I want to start by telling you a story. All right, let's hear it.

So by the way, mom and dad, you may not want to hear this story. But whatever. My, I don't remember

sex education in school at all. I have no recollection of it. I do remember my mother, which I thought

she did a good job. She sat down when I was in early grade school and

explained to me how babies were made. And she drew the ovaries and the uterus and, you know,

the vaginal canal. And she talked about the sperm going up through the vaginal canal and meeting

the egg and it coming down. She drew it out the whole picture. And that's what I remember. And at the time, and for a long time, I thought, like, wow, like my mom really, like did so much more than school did. And then fast forward, I was 16 years old and I lost my virginity in the back seat of a minivan at like 3 a.m. It was very romantic. And the next day, so I'm talking like 29 hours later,

I was with my friend who incidentally was that person's younger sister, and I went to the bathroom.

And I sat down on the toilet and this gush of blood came out. And it was not period blood, right? Like it was watery. It was a gush.

And I panicked. And I called a friend, obviously not the friend who's house I was at because I just slept with a brother.

And I said to her, this is embarrassing to this day. I said, I had sex and I think I got pregnant and just had a miscarriage.

Because at 16 years old, that was, I didn't know anything else except for those mechanics of like the sperm meets the egg.

...