My parents did not have an amicable divorce. Frankly, I don’t think either of them ever spoke a civil word about the other as long as they lived. Mom got custody and dad got visitation. It was always strange when we went with dad. He had traveled a lot for work during their marriage, and preferred to spend his time in the bars rather than at home, so he really seemed a stranger to me.
He soon was living with another woman (to their credit, their marriage lasted the rest of dad’s life — I guess he eventually found the right woman).
Money was tight after the separation, with mom working three part-time jobs for several years. She hadn’t worked during their marriage, and returning to the workforce couldn’t have been easy.
Eventually, she managed to get back full-time with the phone company, her employer before her marriage, and things got a bit easier financially, though we were a decidedly working-class family.
I started working illegally the summer I was 13, hauling cinder blocks for a friend’s dad, who owned a small construction company. The work was grueling, but handing cinder blocks up overhead repeatedly for 8 hours a day put me in great shape to play football that fall.
I’d always been close with my mom, as so many of us with a stay-at-home parent tend to be. Mom was the one consistent presence in my life, and was like deity to me: the source of my life, my provider, my healer, and my protector.
I remember a line from the movie The Crow: ‘Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children.’ That line still evokes fond memories of my mother. Can there be a love purer than that between mother and child?
I was a pretty good kid, in hindsight. I got good grades (honor society all throughout high school), was active in sports and other activities, and had a path for my life planned in the Army at an early age. Sure, I liked to party a bit — beer and weed, mostly, but nothing that ever caused any legal trouble.
A lot of that, I credit to my mom. Ours was a “you’re going to do it anyway, so I’d rather you and your friends did it here” house. Mom was, in many ways, surprisingly permissive, though in other ways, she could be surprisingly rigid, too. She was a product of her own upbringing, I suppose.
I remember once during my senior year in high school, mom walked in on me while I was masturbating to a porn mag. I swore that my bedroom door was locked, but it suddenly swung open and she stepped in to the sight of me laying on my bed, pleasuring myself. I quickly tried to cover up and remove the magazine from her sight.
She ducked out quickly and closed the door without a word, but later told me that I shouldn’t touch myself, that it was wrong. I was confused by this; snooping in my mom’s closet years earlier, I had found a book of Scandinavian erotica. I had seen mom on multiple occasions, laying in her bed under the covers, reading the book, which was called Love 1 & 2. I found it exciting to think that mom read, and was probably aroused by, the stories. I couldn’t understand, though, why she would read such things without giving herself release.
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