“So, what? You expect me to pick up where Dad left off?” I asked incredulously.
Mother didn’t miss a beat. “Do you want to?”
“I- what?”
“It’s very simple, son. Do you want to pick up where our father left off? I promised myself that I would not seduce you. To my way of thinking, that would be too much like taking away the choice and free will to make your own decisions. I will not lie to you, however: if you decide that you desire me, I won’t turn you away. Tonight, for the first time in your life, you’ve taken a moment to see me as every other man sees me. You said so yourself, that you could not deny what your friend said about me, that I’m beautiful. You think I don’t know that about myself? Father made sure that I understood just how attractive I am. And, if that wasn’t enough, other men have made it very clear, too. We don’t get out into town very much, but when we have, didn’t you ever notice how other men would stare at me? I certainly did. I don’t flaunt it, I don’t actively TRY to accentuate the beauty that comes to me naturally, but I am supremely aware of it. And it’s been very, very tempting for me to just go out and get my rocks off with some dolt who just thinks I’m beautiful. But I haven’t and I won’t. Because, at the end of the day, I love our father too much.”
“But with me it’s somehow okay?”
Mother’s gaze softened. “Absolutely. Yes.”
“How?” I asked in bewilderment. “How could it be okay to take your own son to bed, but not another man?”
And then she hit me with a truth that I’d known all along but didn’t have the courage to face on my own. “Because I love you… and I know that you love me. And if you’re going to have sex with someone, with ANYONE, you should love that person completely FIRST, before you even so much as touch a hair on her head. No one will love you as much as I do. And no one will love me as much as you do. It’s just that simple, son.” She stood up, walked over to me and planted a soft, loving kiss on the top of my scalp, the way she’d done countless times as I was growing up, the way any mother would kiss her son good night.
“Keep the album for a little while if you like,” she said from above me as the synapses in my brain fused. “And finish your cake. If you want to come join me in bed tonight or tomorrow night or any night in the future, you’re welcome there and I will teach you all that I know about all the things I couldn’t teach you before.” She gave me another kiss, exactly like the first and then walked out of the kitchen. When she passed through the doorway, she said over her shoulder, “You’re a man now and a man has to choose his own way. Our father taught us both that.”
As you might imagine, I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay awake well past midnight, thinking about the implications of what I’d just learned about my family. She’d said that incest had been going on in my family for many generations. The implication was that all I’d ever learned about incest must be totally wrong. With my grandmother being the only exception I knew of, we had no history of illness or… defectives in our family. If anything, we were the exact opposite of the image held by Society of what an inbred family might look like. The males were all hale and hearty, leaning towards Adonis-like, while the women (from the pictures I saw in the family photo album) all appeared to become more beautiful with every generation. It was like sex appeal was being bred INTO us rather than out of us.
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