Month: August 2011

Our Mothers, Sex…and Freedom

For reasons I have never quite understood, children tend to flinch, blanch and wince at any suggestion that their parents might have had sex for the pure pleasure of it, rather than solely for the purpose of having children.  It has never made sense to me that a child might prefer to think they were conceived by an emotionally disconnected physical act, rather than one drenched in pleasure and absorbed in carnal indulgence and abandon.  It seems to be almost universally against the nature of children to think of their parents as having had a sexual appetite, let alone a possibly ravenous one.  Taking pleasure is often perceived as selfish, and parents are supposed to be decidedly self-less. Indeed if children were to spend any time thinking about their parents having been so physically and emotionally enraptured and enwrapped, other questions might arise from which to further flinch, blanch and wince.  Such as how often their parents had sex.  And what kind of sex they had.  And where they had it.  And under what circumstances.  Which might actually lead to a conversation with their parents about, well, you know…sex.  Children don’t want to go there.  Nor, really, do their parents.  Parent/child conversations about sex usually revolve around the egg/sperm get together, and preventing pregnancy and being responsible and careful and cautious.  With all the worry involved, how can one openly and curiously venture into the dangerous territory of physical pleasure? All of which musings would naturally lead to these dreaded, inevitable, inexorable, and ultimate queries:  Within all of our parents’ wanton and woozy pleasure, did they actually mean to have us or was our conception merely a byproduct of sex rather than as the sole intended purpose of it?  Are we meant to be here, or were we merely accidents?… Continue reading Our Mothers, Sex…and Freedom

On Birthdays and Black Nail Polish

I never set out to write about being a stepparent, but then I never set out to be a stepmother. To be honest, I never set out to get married or to have children, so long before not intending to be a stepmother, I hadn’t intended to be a biological, adoptive or surrogate mother either.  No, I never set out to embrace the neatly ordered schedule traditionally required by a husband, children, assorted pets, multiple cars and a house-and-yard-with-white-picket-fence. Unlike little girls I well remember from my childhood, I never dressed up like a fairy princess, I never dreamed about marrying a handsome prince, never fantasized about an exotic wedding, or imagined what we might call our children, fervently writing down possible names on little slips of paper until hitting upon the ones that would perfectly reflect the magical essence of our carefully envisioned family.  But I was always ever so slightly jealous of girls who had these innocent fantasies, because it seemed so normal, so natural to want to grow up, get married and start a family. And it seemed decidedly, dismayingly, even distressingly abnormal not to want to.  At least that is what everyone told me, particularly other little girls.  And we all know how convincing little girls can be. I confess that even in my teenaged years I was never compelled to plaster my bedroom walls with the airbrushed images of fantasy princes – most popularly embodied at the time by John, Paul, George and Ringo – one of whom would surely, if only I could be at the right place at the right moment, put a ring on my finger one day.

New York, Italy, Virginia, Italy, Kentucky…Italy

My mother was a collector of letters and photographs.  She filled old shoeboxes with meticulously hand-written communications from my father’s Italian relatives, their fragile parchment leaves folded within envelopes bearing intriguing foreign stamps and exotic return addresses.  Bunches of letters bound together with thin rubber bands, their cohesive elasticity pushed to the limit, filled the corners of her closet, were tucked under her bed, and occupied the shelves in the green-painted hutch originally intended for crockery, while oversized and heartier legal documents were crammed into manila envelopes marked Soragna Farm, Liguria Affair, or, simply, Italy.  The years passed, she ran out of room, and even more letters eventually took the place of the spirits bottles in her elegant old liquor cabinet. Yet there was a decided devotion to the care she took in maintaining the scores of letters exchanged with my father before and during their marriage, most of which were shielded from the harsh New Mexico sunlight by an inexpensive desk centered under her bedroom window.  Occasionally, when she was out watering the garden, I would sneak in to read whatever I could easily access in an unlocked drawer, a far safer way to snoop than staying longer when she would go out shopping.  If I had too much time, I feared, I would disturb whatever invisible order there was in her placement of the letters and she would surely know I had been going through her things.