I'm pretty sure everyone knows and has first-hand experience with the moment that I'm about to describe.

You're a teenager and you're watching some seemingly-normal movie with your parents. Maybe you rented it from Blockbuster or maybe it’s showing on the 2-week free HBO preview. Whatever the case may be, because you’re a teenager and it’s family time, obviously the inevitable sex scene comes on and everyone in the room sort of stops moving and tries not to look at each other. Because you, at the age of 15 can't possibly know what sex is or be interested in it. And your parents don't want you to think about the fact that they have ever had sex, which your mere existence serves to disprove, and you certainly don’t want to think about the fact that they ever have either. And you don’t want them telling you that your upcoming date with that new cute guy from your algebra class is a no-go.

So maybe you did as I did when watching Jack draw Rose “like one of [his] French girls” in Titanic (which I had luckily seen twice in theatres and was thus prepared for) and you got up and grabbed yourself a snack a full 30 seconds in advance of the nudity and resulting steamed-up car window. Something like microwave popcorn that requires your attention in the kitchen for a solid 4 minutes. Pop. Pop. Pop.

The scene is over? They’re out of the car. Whew. Crisis averted. Now let’s go sink that ship!

My girls are 5 ½ and 1 ½, so I’m a solid decade away from the above-referenced awkwardness (sorry if you’re in the thick of it on the other side now!). But I guess that was all-the-more reason I was so surprised by a different kind of discomfort.

It came in the form of Sesame Street.

My eldest daughter has been watching Sesame Street: Old School episodes on DVD for the past 4 months. She has a pretty limited amount of TV-time available to her each day, so the fact that she kept selecting from the same 11 episodes really speaks to the power of 1960s and 1970s public television.

The DVD….

I highly recommend, despite the awkwardness

So when it came time for our trip to the beach for a week, it was no surprise that she wanted to bring the DVDs with her. In addition to the 5 discs we’d been rotating between, she also elected to bring one of the ones we hadn’t yet opened: a 2-hour-long “best of” compilation spanning from 1969 through 1989. Perfect! The first 80 minutes of the disc was full of great stuff: John-John counting to 20; Kermit singing, “It’s Not That Easy Being Green”, Mr. Hooper surfing, Bert doing “the pigeon”.

My daughter was enthralled.

Morning three of vacation, we prepped ourselves to watch the last 40 minutes. “I Lost my Cookie at the Disco”; Smokey Robinson doing “‘U’ Really Got a Hold on Me” while being groped by a giant red letter-U. All the classics.

Things then got a little rough.

Mr. Hooper died. This was particularly poignant, as my daughter’s grandfather - her father’s father - had unexpectedly passed away this past May. And much like Big Bird, when he says, “I’ll just give it to him later,” regarding his drawing of Mr. Hooper, Juliana initially struggled a bit to understand death’s permanence. But because I knew about this scene - much like I did back with Jack and Rose - I was prepared for it. So when she remarked, “That’s just like Papa… he’s never coming back, right?”, I was ready. I teared up. I recovered. The scene ended. “Put Down the Ducky” came on to save the day.

But then, a few light-hearted scenes later came the unexpected.

My awkward “movie” moment with my daughter was not a suggestive sex-scene; it was an unanticipated white wedding. The chords of Mendollsen’s “Wedding March” began to play, and I glanced up to see the typical 1980s pouf wedding dress headed down the aisle, worn by Maria as she walked towards a smiling Luis. And even more to my horror was the look of awe and happiness on the face of my daughter during the subsequent song, "Wedding Pictures", as both the bride and groom each sing (in their heads) about being nervous and wanting to run away, a point that was lost on my daughter amidst the wedded bliss.

I’ve never been a big pusher of traditional gender roles. When my daughter switched her favorite color from yellow to pink at the age of 4, I was mildly annoyed. When she received a wedding dress costume for her dress-up closet, I wrote a nice thank you but exchanged it for a fire-fighter. I know that J loves the wedding pictures of us that, up until recently, hung in multiple places around the house; her, and now her sister’s, “nap song” has always been her father’s and my wedding song (“Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”). She has commented about loving our rings (which neither of us has been wearing since early July). And yet, I guess I didn’t anticipate that somehow, she had picked up on the idea that getting married was something “big”.

Just some of the pieces of “us”

And so watching my sweet little girl smiling at the idea of a wedding... approximately two weeks before when I knew her father and I would be telling her that he and I were no longer going to be married was, well, rough… more so than the loss of Mr. Hooper “just because”... and more so than Jack and Rose’s fateful romance. And maybe it’s because I knew something that J didn’t.

When Mr. Hooper dies, both she and I know that it is sad. As Bob cries to Big Bird about how things will never be the same, J and I both have the unspoken understanding that things truly aren’t the same without her Papa… because we’ve experienced it… together. When my parents and I collectively pretend that sex does not exist, it’s sort of by an unspoken agreement. But when J and I watch Maria and Luis vow to spend the rest of their lives together, there is no common experience, no unspoken understanding. She’s smiling; whereas I’m aware that I’m about to be the one to take that away from her. I couldn’t wait for it to be over; she declared it to be her favorite scene ever. Dammit.

As moms, we all know that there are those moments when our children lose little bits of their innocence. But maybe you’re like me in thinking that it’s going to be the rest of the world that sort of chips away at this… because it can’t be us who do the chipping. But in watching her watch that wedding with a contented smile on her face, I knew that I - and her father - that we were about to rob her of a bit of her childhood innocence. And, truth-be-told, I still have no idea what to say or how to say it, but I do know that it’s going to force our biggest little girl just a bit more out of that “little” stage.