My 'woring' Mother

Early memories of my mother are sparse and contradictory. I can just recall a vivacious smiling woman, slim and beautiful, with dark brown hair tumbling across her face, picking me up and throwing me giggling into the air and then catching me safely as I came down. I can, sort of, remember her tucking me into bed, stroking hair from my face and kissing me goodnight. Nice warm memories.

But then I can also remember her spending too much time asleep, or moving clumsily from chair to bed, her blank eyes staring at me with little sign of love or even of recognition. She didn't even cry when I was taken into care, although I did, I cried enough for both of us as I was carried from the room, my very last sight was of her sprawled dirty and unkempt across the sofa, hardly aware of my screams and tears.

It wasn't until I was much older, old enough to understand, that my foster parents, those good devoted foster parents who had brought me up in her stead, tried to explain about the alcohol and how it had robbed me of a loving, caring mother and left instead a shambling wreck unable to look after me properly or even care for herself. It wasn't her fault, they told me, that she couldn't handle the death of my father from a heart attack and that she had turned to vodka to blot out her loss, to give her the support that society had so manifestly failed to provide. Alcohol had pulled a veil over her eyes, shielding her from the pain yes, but shielding her from the world as well, from her son, from her family, and in the end from reality.

My eighteenth birthday arrived and with it came a determination to find that mother, my real, natural mother, and discover which was the genuine article, the happy loving woman or the alcoholic wreck. I wanted, needed, my actual mother, my birth mother, to be whole and happy, and to love me as I dreamed she would all those years. The idea of going through my entire life without sharing a hug with my mother wasn't worth thinking about and that's why I made my decision.

Finding out where she lived wasn't difficult, my foster parents knew where she was; they had always known where she was through address change after address change. For some reason, some vague hope that they could reunite us, they had kept an up to date address, and even when she hadn't shown the slightest inclination to hear of me, they had maintained that tenuous link. Their faith in human nature made my eyes prickle with gratitude, and even though they warned me to expect disillusionment, to expect rejection and disappointment, they willingly gave me the address and their best wishes.

For weeks I carried the address around with me, but without ever plucking up the courage to go and knock on the door. I even walked past the place several times trying to get up the nerve, but it always failed me. Maybe it was the house, I told myself, standing in a previously smart middleclass area that had long gone to seed, although the place itself was well maintained and smartly painted. It was once the warm welcoming home of a prosperous family, but that was long ago and now, like it's neighbours, the curtains were always drawn, blocking out the world as if to say 'I'm not interested in you, so go away and leave me alone'. I always did just that, walking up the street full of good intentions, only to stop below the imposing door and then walk on, all courage vanished.

Strangely enough, it was an interfering neighbour who finally gave me the impetus to take the last step and push the bell. There I stood, as I had several times before, looking up those few steps at the bell push and trying to work out what to say, when a man called me from across the street.

"Leave it, son." He told me, shaking his head.

What did he mean, I wondered, and how did he know, and why was he being so disparaging, that was my mother he was talking about? I wasn't going to be deflected from my course by some meddling busybody and so I flashed him the meanest look I could muster and rang the bell.

The woman who answered the door certainly wasn't drunk, but then she wasn't what I was expecting either. She could never be described as motherly. More like a milf on a night out, and a sexy milf at that, dressed up in a short black skirt and a white low cut blouse that displayed the top half of gorgeously full breasts. It was a 'shag me now' outfit. Yes I know I'm talking about my mother, but that is what she looked like. You've also got to remember that I'd not seen her for a long, long time and 'mother' was not a word that I linked with the woman before me.

"Don't just stand there, come in."

She stood back, casting a quick defensive glance up and down the length of the street before shutting the door firmly behind me. The action seemed a little strange, but who was I to say? Maybe she didn't get on with her neighbours.

I looked anxiously about me, trying to take in my surroundings. The hall was expensively carpeted and the walls papered in a good quality flock paper in two shades of red. But the effect wasn't helped by a bright light in a red shade that cast a rather unreal volcanic radiance over a colour scheme of little more than various shades of red anyway. I didn't like it. The place was dressed as she was, overdone and in poor taste.

"You've not been here before, have you?"

It seemed a very odd question with which to greet a long lost son, and the way it was asked was almost confrontational. I shook my head mutely, lost for appropriate words and wondering what the hell was going on.

"Who told you about me?"

I nearly said 'my mother', meaning my foster mother, but then I remembered who I was talking to and lapsed into silent and red-faced confusion.

"Well, it doesn't matter. It'll be fifty pounds for a basic, anything else is extra. You have got your card, haven't you?"

I gazed stupidly at her, unable to make sense of her words, and still unable to utter a single word of explanation for my visit.

"You are here for business, aren't you?" She sounded doubtful now.

I stood and looked at her, tossing her words around in my head. And then an awful realisation hit me, and I knew exactly what she was on about and exactly why she was dressed the way she was. The blood must have drained from my face as I suddenly understood that my mother was a prostitute.

"I can't, not with you." I stammered, uttering ridiculous and unhelpful words that told her nothing.

She raised her eyebrows. "No? So what are you here for?"

"You're my mother."

She looked at me in shock for a moment, and then my words sank in and recognition dawned.

"Vincent?" She whispered.

I knew then that I had to be right; it had to be my mother. I'd been a bit worried that I'd got the wrong woman, but no other person on earth would have known me by my first name. I disliked it intensely and always went by my middle name, Andrew, and that was usually contracted to Andy. Even my foster parents, who obviously knew my full name, always just called me Andy.

"Andrew now, and I like Andy better." I corrected her.

It was not one of those 'we fell into each others arms and cried tears of happiness' kind of meetings. Both of us were only too conscious of the last time we'd seen each other those years ago, and perhaps even worse, of the circumstances of our reunion. But then neither of us rejected the other either, perhaps because curiosity about the intervening years provided enough of a connection to allow us to at least sit down and talk.

The first thing we did was to agree on names, she agreed to call me Andy and I agreed to call her Liz, for it was too late and too confusing to think of her as 'Mum', or 'Ma', or even 'Mother'. My 'mum' would always be my foster mum and Liz understood that, knowing that she had relinquished the right to be a mum many drunken years ago.

I'll give her respect for one thing; she didn't try to hide anything from me. She told me openly that she earned money as a prostitute, and that her clientele came almost exclusively from the college a couple of streets over, her availability spread by word of mouth. She preferred the younger customers (I'm not going to call them 'tricks' or 'johns' -- that just doesn't seem right.), she said, because their bodies were tight and firm and they very rarely wanted anything other than straight sex or maybe a blow job. I could see the logic in that, although in my mind the 'younger customers' were little more than boys. They were my age for god's sake! But at least she made them produce a student's union card to prove that they weren't underage, although I think that was more to avoid problems with the law rather than for reasons of morality.

Her story was simple, and she expressed it in simple terms, with no apologies, no whitewashing, and no embarrassment. After having me taken away from her she had moved away to the big city, where selling her body provided the way to finance her alcohol addiction. Slowly but surely she was drawn further into the inner city web of organised prostitution, something that ended only when she ran her pimp's own threatening knife down his own threatening face and, very fortunately, received a suspended sentence for wounding, suspended that is, on condition that she went for rehab. She went through the hell of drying out, and when it was over she moved back to her home town where her former 'protector' would never think to find her.

The problem then was that she had nothing, no money, no furniture, no job, and no likelihood of getting any of the things everyone else took for granted. The 'game' had been relatively easy money and so it was almost inevitable that she would return to it, this time to finance her life rather than her habits.

Intelligent and astute, she realised that street corners were not the place to make a safe and reliable income, and she had soon set herself up in a flat and had put the word out among the student population of the town that she was there to cater exclusively to them. Each year the older students tipped off the freshmen, who often had a virginity that they were only too happy to quietly lose to someone who knew what to do, and she soon had a self-renewing and dependable clientele.

She had found herself a little niche in the market and she had prospered, raising enough money to buy the house she now lived and worked in, and leading an unobtrusive and outwardly respectable life. She didn't advertise, she didn't cause problems, and with most of her neighbours believing that she gave revision lessons to students, the police, if they were aware of her at all, left well alone. It had taken nearly seven years, but she was satisfied now that she had a secure way of life and a comfortable income.

The downside of her life was loneliness. She had almost no friends, and therefore almost no social life. And of course, the silly thing is that, even though she had sex several times a day, she had absolutely no sex life. Young men, such as her clients invariably were, are notoriously quick to finish, and she joked dryly that she must be the only woman who gets fucked daily, but who still orders her batteries wholesale.

The house had three floors and the layout was quite flexible to her needs. She'd arranged things so that the ground floor was her working area, with the front room turned into the boudoir/bedroom where she entertained her clients, and the rooms behind -- the former dining room and kitchen -- made into rooms where she could rest or shower, or clean up, or whatever was needed. Upstairs were her private quarters, with the usual two floor layout just one floor higher than normal. Her living room, dining room and kitchen were on the middle floor, with the top floor containing two bedrooms, a bathroom and a spare.

I mention all this because she had taken me through into her back room where she would relax and wait for customers, and while I was there one of her clients turned up and she excused herself to go through and service his requirements. I was put in the rather embarrassing position of sitting in a strange house listening to someone fucking my mother in the next room and making quite a noise about doing so. I couldn't hear very clearly but it was still a strange situation, especially as listening to the pair of them having sex was uncoiling the snake in my own trousers. Even reminding myself that it was my mother on the receiving end didn't stop me getting a right royal hard-on. After seeing him out, she came back through wearing just a robe and headed for the shower.

"Sorry about that." She called back to me as she steamed past. "But if you aim to keep calling on me you'll have to get used to me working."

She let the robe drop just as she disappeared into the shower and I was treated to my first sight of her naked back, and I must say that it was a surprisingly nice sight too. Had I seen that view in a photo I would have said the person pictured was somewhere in her twenties, not just the wrong side of forty. But more was to come. Several minutes later she leaned out of the shower, wearing nothing more than a few beads of water, and asked me to pass her a towel. She might be my mother, but I have to say that she had one hell of a body, wide hips, flat stomach and self-raising breasts capped with neat, dark brown nipples. I stared for a good three seconds before her face knitted in an impatient frown and I did as I was told.

"You'll have to get used to that too." She told me. "I've lived alone far too long to worry about covering everything up all the time, especially when anyone with a few quid can see it all anyway."

As I walked home to my foster parents I wondered what I should -- or could -- say to them, but as usual they made it easy for me. I told them that I'd met my natural mother and that we'd got along better than I expected, and that we were intent on staying in touch, when my foster father asked the question.

"What does she do for a living, son." He asked gently.

"Don't you know?" I asked him, for want of a better reply.

"Yes, I know." He told me. "I just wanted to be sure that you did."

"Yes, dad. I know."

"And then that makes me proud of you." He smiled. "You find out something like that and I can see that it's not important to you. Or at least, it's not as important as the person. Love her, Andy, and don't lose her again. She's the woman you owe life to, and she can't be all bad to bring a man like you into the world."

For the second time in recent weeks my eyes prickled for my parents.

"Thanks dad."

I called back to see my real mother the next day, and this time she looked more like a mother and less like a whore, probably because she knew I was coming and wanted to show herself as a normal woman. Her brown hair was held back in a loose ponytail, her makeup was far more discreet and feminine, and she wore jeans with a fashionable top.

She still looked good, even though the only sexy thing about her outfit this time was that her top needed to be at least three inches longer to hide a very attractive tanned midriff, but I managed to keep my eyes from that for most of the time. Funny, isn't it, I'd been apart from her for so long that some of the familial taboos didn't seem to apply and I could look on my own mother as a sexually attractive being.

This time she took me upstairs to her own private quarters, to her tastefully decorated and very comfortable lounge, where we sat and talked for hours. I was, she told me, the first man to ever see upstairs. Her working life and her private life were kept completely and very firmly separate, and so I felt privileged. We even ate together, sharing a bowl of pasta carbonara and a salad, and it felt good.

There was a bond, there was a connection, be it genetic or otherwise, and we got along like a house on fire, although this time it was my turn to describe my, very nondescript, life. She knew more about me than I expected she would, so I knew that she had followed my childhood, albeit from a distance, and one thing I did find out that day was that she had resolutely declined to have anything to do with me, not because she didn't care, but because she didn't think she deserved me, and didn't think I should be lumbered with a recovering alcoholic prostitute as a mother. She wasn't ashamed of what she did, but she didn't want me to feel ashamed for her. My eyes prickled for the first time for my new mother, my real mother.

Eventually, late on in the afternoon she paused, looked at the clock, and put up a hand as if to bring proceedings to a close.

"I've a client expected soon, Andy, so I'll have to go down and get ready. If you want to come down with me and stick around I won't mind, in fact I think I'd like you to. But if you don't want to be here when I'm working, I'll understand."

"No, it's fine, Liz. I'd like to stay."

As a matter of fact listening to my mother getting laid by her punter yesterday had been more of a turn on than I cared to admit, and had in fact fuelled a pretty good wank when I got to the privacy of my bedroom. The sight of my mother naked afterwards hadn't hurt either.

"All right, I'd feel better if you did." She stopped talking and looked at me, for the first time showing a little vulnerability. "The truth is..." She paused again. "The truth is that knowing you were there yesterday made me feel a lot more comfortable. I've never had any real trouble from a client, but you never know, and some of those lads are a lot bigger than I am. If one ever did play up I might have a job to throw him out."

I had to smile. Liz, my mother, is only about five four, if that, and not exactly big built. I'm six two, and I absolutely tower over her. Then words came out of my mouth that I really didn't expect or intend.

"Would it make you happier if I moved into your spare room and lived here?"

Her look went from disbelief via bewilderment to amazement, and then finished off with excitement and happiness. I had never seen expressions flit across a face so quickly.

"I'd love you to." She was so pleased she even giggled behind her words. "At times I do get scared. Like I say, I don't expect any problems, but it only needs one, doesn't it?"

Explaining to my foster folks wasn't painless, but as always they supported what I wanted to do and I moved with their best wishes ringing in my ears, along with an assurance that I could always move back if it didn't work out. I vowed, and meant, that I would visit them regularly, and that their Christmas cards would always be to 'mum and dad'. There was no way I'd ever cut them out of my life.

Moving in with Liz was even easier than I imagined, and I got the first hug from my real mother that I'd had for years and years. I'd no sooner put my bag and laptop on my new bed than she was wrapping herself around me and squeezing me fit to bust. It felt so nice to have my mother's arms around me at long last.

But it must also be said that I had to forcibly remind myself for a moment of who she was, because she was wearing another 'crop-top' sweatshirt and one of my hands had landed on the bare skin of her lower back. She didn't seem to notice and I didn't see the need to tell her.

She only had three customers booked that day, and for all three I was within easy reach in her back room -- just in case. The trouble with being within easy reach was that I was within easy earshot too, and I had to listen again to the sounds of energetic sex in the next room. I supposed to myself that I would get used to it, but at that time it was very disconcerting, and I found myself prowling around instead of sitting and quietly waiting for her to finish. I especially found myself studying the large landscape print that hung on the wall separating the two rooms. Not that I was looking at the picture particularly, I just couldn't stop staring in the direction of my mother and her client, even though a solid wall existed between us. It was during her second client of the day that I made a rather electrifying discovery.