Looking back I think I was very confused by the situation. Mostly I felt trapped by a responsibility to look after mother (because in truth there was no one else), and I wanted to escape both that responsibility and her thankless behaviour, but there was another part of me who occasionally ‘enjoyed’ the intimacy of being near her. I was after all 19 years old and had normal sexual needs which I rarely even acknowledged let alone addressed. Although I’d not seen very much of her body, nor had any kind of inappropriate relations or even thoughts, there were moments when I looked more at my mother than I should, and I think I instinctively saw these opportunities as some kind of shadowy reward for all the anguish she put me through. As I said it wasn’t conscious. I hated being around her during the day, but in the evenings I didn’t seem to mind so much. Looking back I think it may have been something to with the fact she took sleeping pills for her nerves (and sometimes combined these with a small ‘tipple’ of sherry), making her unsteady in the evening, and less conscious of her attire. Her dressing gown wasn’t held so tight and I could occasionally see the edge of her bra or the cleavage of her breasts. Sometimes she would lie on the sofa and show an expanse of nylon covered leg. As I said I never did anything, except maybe look when I should have turned away.
However things changed between mother and I after something occurred that made me question my understanding of her situation. It was a throw-away comment made by the man who came to repair our hot water boiler that changed things, and set me on a new (and controversial) path. The poor man was struggling to fix our very old and wonky system, which kept breaking down. He was trying to explain to mother how we desperately needed a new boiler, but she wouldn’t listen, berating him instead for not fixing it properly, and lamenting how the cold water was making her various illnesses so much worse and how it was all his fault.
Eventually he got it working after a fashioned. He warned us it would not last much longer, hurriedly grabbed his tools, and rushed out to escape my mother’s vicious tongue. I showed him to the door, and as he left he looked at me and raised his eyes to the heavens. “I don’t know how you put up with her,” he half-whispered. “What a neurotic old woman! What she needs is a damn good rogering!” And then he was gone.
I confess I didn’t understand at first what he meant by the term ‘rogering’, and it wasn’t until later I realised he was talking about sex. He was saying my mother was the way she was because she wasn’t getting enough (or indeed any) sex. It had never occurred to me before that a lack of a physical relationship might be the cause of her problems, but I suddenly equated all her symptoms with the concept of being frustrated. Could it be, I wondered to myself, that sexual drives are a form of energy that need to be expressed, and if blocked the energy ‘leaks’ out in other (perhaps entirely inappropriate) ways?