Growing up, I remember how some kids had parents who were real old. These kids would get real embarrassed whenever their mom or pop came to school and other kids would ask if they were their grandparents.
Well I had the opposite problem. My mom had me when she was fourteen. And my dad, her boyfriend, was only sixteen at the time. And then a year later, not yet fifteen, my mother had another child, my sister Amy. Mom and dad grew up in the hollows of Kentucky where it wasn't all that uncommon for mothers to be so young.
But as a fourteen year old mother, and then at fifteen, with two kids in tow, mom just couldn't handle it. So we were handed over to my grandmother who took over the child rearing chores. We'd see mom once in a while, but she went back to high school and resumed living the life of a teenager. Then, when she was eighteen, she moved to California to join our dad, who was in the Service there. For years me and Amy even assumed that our grandmother was our mother.
But then when I was six and Amy was five, our mom took us back. She was twenty at the time. Mom and grandma had some sort of a falling out, and mom decided that she was now ready to raise her kids herself. Right after that our pop was killed in a training accident.
It took mom a long time to get over dad's death, and this was a tough time for all of us. Me and Amy, we'd always looked to grandma as sort of being our mother, now we get had to get used to our real mom.
Then, about a year after our dad died, all sorts of new hassles began. Mom was in still in the prime of young womanhood and acted the part. She'd always been boy crazy, and now she was man-crazy. My sister's eyes and mine would roll as yet another man showed up at our house to spend the night. And I'd lay there in bed, listening, as mom howled out her pleasure one more time.
And now Amy and I had to contend with a mom coming to school and showing up at P.T.A. who was really young, and looked even younger. And so for me, unlike for those with really old parents who other kids figured might be their grandparents, kids thought my mom was my older sister or a baby sitter or something like that. Sometimes it felt kind of cool having such a young and attractive and sexy mother, but other times it would be embarrassing and me and my sister would squirm, having to explain to others that this sassy young fox was actually our own mother.
By the time I was a teenager it got even worse. Now I'd have to watch my buddies ogling my mom, eating her up with their eyes. When I'd be out in public with mom I knew people said to themselves, what's this woman doing going out with such a young dude, a teenager, not knowing this was my own goddamn mother taking me to the mall to buy me a pair of shoes! Or they'd think I was with an older sister. In high school that's what some guys figured, that mom was my sister, and they'd actually ask me if mom was going out with anyone, if maybe I could fix them up with her.
Mom was so great-looking too, and so sexy, that I'd have to deal with these kinds of hassles constantly. When I told them that she was my mom, and that I didn't make it a practice to fix up my pals with my own mother, they'd get all embarrassed and start apologizing and stuff. But then a minute later they'd be grinning and teasing me, asking whether with a mom like that I ever got any ideas of my own, ever fantasized about her.
And of course I did. After all, up until the time I was six I hardly even saw her, though I was aware that she my mom. So it's not like I had all those years to get used to the fact that even though she was so young and so hot-looking, that she was my own mother and that's all she was, could be, or I should even think about her being. Instead, I had to confess to myself, when I'd see men drooling over her, I knew
exactly
why they were reacting that way. I'd start to drool a little myself. I remember I once caught mom stepping out of a shower, all wet and naked, and the sight of her actually gave me an instant hardon!
Then at seventeen I decided to join the Service. My mom was concerned because my dad had died in a Service accident, and mom had never quite gotten over dad. He was still the love of her life. But I told her not to worry, and I also realized I needed to get away from mom. Because, though she never came on to me or anything like that, the allure of being under one roof with her became just too strong. I had even begun to feel extremely jealous when men came over and I was aware they were banging dear old mom, something I knew I couldn't do, and yet deep down in my most secret self
yearned for
so much
.
I had been in the Service for two years and decided to quit, realizing I wasn't really cut out for a career in the military. I'd been overseas for most of that time and it had been more than a year since I'd been back and seen my sister or my mom or anyone else I knew.
"Look at you, Jimmy!" my mom said when she laid her eyes on me after my long absence. "You look like a real
man
now, a red-blooded man!"
Well, at nineteen, I did fill out some and I suppose those two years since I'd left home had added some measure of maturity to my appearance. Mom sure seemed to think so, looking at me with fresh eyes, it seemed. Before, though I'd sometimes glance at mom in this guilty way and entertain fantasies about her, I never once got the sense that mom ever looked at me in the same way. After all I was her son, her teenaged son. But now, as my mom carefully looked me over, there was definitely that new look in her eyes, a look I'd never seen before.
"Damn!" she said. "You've turned into one good-looking dude, baby."
"Thanks, mom," I said, not knowing what else to say.
We talked and I asked her how she'd been.
"Not too good, Jimmy," she moped. "I just split up with a guy."
I'd heard about all that from my sister. See, my mom never got over my dad, and she still had this image of him as the young, handsome Serviceman she had loved so dearly. So as she grew older and dated, she began to date men who were younger than her, much younger, as she herself grew older. That's one thing that used to make me so envious, feel so upset, to see dudes not all that much older than me getting a chance to bang dear old mom. That would irk me no end. Well, my sister told me this last dude my mom had been dating was only twenty and finally dumped mom for a foxy eighteen year he'd also been seeing. I guess mom should've prepared herself for something like that. My sister's theory was that after these young dudes get to conquer mom, they start hankering for babes their own age, with whom they have more in common. My mom is great-looking and sexy as hell, anyone could tell that at first glance. But that's not all a guy seeks when he's dating. So, Amy said, mom had just suffered one more in a string of disappointments, disappointments she was bound to keep having if she dated men who were ten or more years younger than she herself was. At thirty-four, mom was still a pretty young woman and with her youthful appearance she looked at least five years younger than she really was, but, still, she was heading for trouble, Amy figured, if she kept fishing that same old young pond for future lovers.
So now mom told me about the guy she'd been dating, they'd even lived together for a couple of months, told me all about how he finally left her for this college cheerleader, a sorority queen at the local college. Mom couldn't stand that, she said, it made her feel old.
"Maybe you should try dating older men, mom," I ventured, taking a chance giving her advice.
"I've tried, but they just don't do it for me most of the time," she said. "I guess I'm still hung up on your dad and what he was like and how old he was when he died. I guess I'm always trying to re-create those old feelings."
I really appreciated her being so open and honest with me.
"And I guess I'm just getting
old
," mom griped. "And trying to feel young."
"Oh come on, mom, you're not old," I told her. "You're still young and you look even younger. I'm sure you're right in your prime."
"You really think so, honey?" she asked, smiling wistfully.
"Sure," I said. "Women around your age are supposed to be at their sexual peak, aren't they?"
I'd read somewhere that women only hit their sexual prime in their thirties. If that was true, then mom really was at her peak.
"That so?" she said, loving to hear me tell her this, staring at me boldly. "I like that, Jimmy, you thinking about your mom and how she may be at her sexual prime, thinking about her as a sexual creature."
