Incest The Mom Memories" by 'alwayswantedto' collection

[sarit11]

1. "Painting" Mom

by alwayswantedto

All characters are 18 years or older.

Hi, I’m Ben. This is the story about my mother and me. It begins with the familiar return from college and a difficult re-insertion into the home life that I had left four years earlier and had not been part of except for Christmas holidays and the summer after my first year. Each summer after that I had worked a dream job as part of the crew for a company chartering sailboats in the Caribbean. I did that for the first two months after graduation but, due to the sagging economy, the company was forced to let me go. So there I was, on my parents’ doorstep, degree in hand and a few hundred bucks in my pocket, and no job prospects whatsoever. So much for my degree.

I guess Mom and I were both a little surprised by each other. I hadn’t been back to the west coast since the past summer so it had been more than a year since we’d seen each other. The deep tan caught Mom by surprise, probably because each time she’d seen me at Christmas it had had four months to wear off from the previous summer. Also, I was wearing summer garb — shorts and a t-shirt with the sleeves torn off — so my lean, twenty-two year old frame clearly showed the healthy lifestyle I had been living.

Looking at Mom, I could see that she had been making changes of her own. The Simon and Garfunkel tune, The Boxer, wafted out of the living room. Mom was wearing some kind of loose, hippy, tie-dyed long shirt over a pair of almost shredded jeans, an outfit straight from the seventies. Her hair, normally just brushing her shoulders, had been allowed a few more inches of freedom. In addition to the extra length, it was much bushier, its wavy blonde and reddish strands creating a tawny took befitting a younger woman ready for fun. Other than that, Mom looked much the same: a slender woman not much more than five feet tall with a nice figure despite her aversion to strenuous exercise.

We both laughed in pleasant surprise. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming so I could pick you up?” Mom admonished me as the taxi pulled away. “I wanted to surprise you,” I said. Actually, I didn’t want to be a bother. I was kind of bummed out showing up at home almost broke. Truth be known, if I could have found a job, I wouldn’t have come home. “Well, you did that.” Mom suddenly jumped up and kissed me again. “I’m so happy to see you!” Mom turned around and led the way into the house. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “Starving,” I said. I wasn’t really but I knew Mom would want me to eat something and it would take the pressure off conversation if she was busy doing something and my mouth was full. “Take your bags up to your room while I make you something to eat,” she said. “It’s just the way you left it, and come down right away to tell me what you’ve been doing. You can unpack later.” As I turned to go up the stairs, I cast a last glance at Mom’s retreating figure. What had happened to my insurance-rep Mom? Where were the conservative business suits and crisp skirts and blouses? A tie-dyed shirt, faded denims and old tennis shoes? What had happened on the home front in the last year?

My apprehensions at coming home were over-ridden by my curiosity. I did just what Mom said; I tossed my suitcases into my old room and rushed downstairs. I had to find out what had caused this change in my mother. Tomato sandwiches and a large glass of milk were already waiting for me on the kitchen table and Mom was just setting a teapot down with a tall, slim mug decorated with some kind of pseudo-medieval design in pastel colors. Mom asked me what I’d been up to right away but when I started eating she slipped into telling me all about what she’d been doing. Evidently, she had had a life changing experience that led her to quit the insurance business to take up sculpting full time. Dad wasn’t too happy about the loss of income but she had put her foot down and refused to change her mind. She was going to become a sculptor, a professional one, whether he liked it or not. However, she admitted that she felt under pressure to sell some of her works now that it had been almost a year since she’d quit her job.