A Mother to a Husband

CONTENT WARNING: This story contains parental death and sexual themes. All events depicted are fictional.

The day of my father’s funeral, I formed a symbiotic relationship with my mother, who, for the purposes of this story remaining about me, and in part for her anonymity as an entity outside of the tandem parasites we became, will remain nameless and faceless. My father himself was not a particularly stern man, nor was he exceptionally kind or smart enough to be worth more than a small epitaph in a story that otherwise doesn’t concern him. He lived twenty three years as a bachelor and forty years married to my mother, the latter of which was spent in part yearning for fatherhood, and—later—regretting it entirely. You see, my parents had trouble, in the early days of their union, conceiving a child together. Apparently, according to the stories my mother would tell me as a child, they tried for years with no sign of their luck changing, and even the doctors—who declared them perfectly healthy—considered their infertility to be somewhat of a medical mystery. They were at their wits end, genuinely debating adoption or surrogacy, when my mother—thirteen years into being married and having nothing except a husband to show for it—fell pregnant.

It was half miracle, half nightmare. Or so I’ve been told. With my mother closing in on the menopause, this was her last chance to bring a healthy child to term. Suddenly, she became obsessive. Any sign of contamination in the house would send her into a fit of anxiety, and from the moment she woke up until the early hours of the morning—when she would finally get a few hours of sleep every night—she would clean. She had a routine where she would work her way through the house from top to bottom, beginning with the cobwebs in the attic and ending with the soap suds on the basement floor. Of course, by the time the basement was, in her words, perfect, the attic would be dusty again, and so back up the stairs she would plod, mop brandished in her hand, to begin again.

She told me this story many times in my childhood. She would always laugh it off as the product of her overprotective nature, which never truly went away even after I was born at a healthy eight pounds three ounces, but sometimes she would frame it differently. Her eyes would darken, and her words—the same words as always—would hang heavy in the air, almost as if she was telling me a cautionary tale.

I always end up speaking more about my mother when I’m supposed to be talking about my father.

Where my father was average, my mother was—and I say this even though I haven’t spoken to her in months—exceptional. She acted in commercials and movies as a child star, and settled down away from fame with my father in her early twenties. I don’t suppose that it was young love, but he was a mere coffee-boy on the set of a film she was starring in as an extra, and I never bothered asking any more about their love story than that.

They say that a boy who learns to love his mother properly will grow up to be a good man to his wife.

And now, finally, I will introduce myself. You know the circumstances of my parentage, as well as the fact that my father died and my relationship with my mother was permanently affected by it. If you have done the calculations correctly based on the little information I have given you thus far, you will have been able to work out that I am twenty seven years old. This, I know, is something ominous. People die at twenty seven. Then again, people die all across the world at any age, and this story itself began with the death of a man in his sixties, so it’s possible that I’m putting too much importance on something that really doesn’t have anything to do with the events I am about to relay to you.

Oh—and one other thing. I haven’t left my room in almost a year.

It started after my father’s funeral. The ceremony itself was quiet, attended by extended family and a brief scattering of his university friends, none of whom I had even heard of before his death brought them out of the woodwork. I would normally have doubted their authenticity, but my father’s will—of which there wasn’t much to leave—was inherited directly and completely by my mother. For two people who shared finances for forty years, it wasn’t much of a change. The world continued to turn, and my father was dead.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. It is not through grief that I hid myself away. I have always erred on the side of independence, but I didn’t lock my bedroom door behind me that day intending not to come out ever again. My mother held the wake in our house, explaining to me that it was what my father would have wanted. Truthfully, I didn’t particularly care either way. While the rest of the guests tiptoed around the heaviness of their grief, muddling it around my father’s armchair in platitudes of how supposedly young he was—at sixty three!—I simply didn’t want to deal with that many people in my house at once. Retreating to my bedroom was nothing more than a fuck you to those aforementioned university students, who evidently didn’t have degrees in knowing not to overstay their welcome.

But I digress. What is truly important to me about the day of my father’s funeral is how my mother never cried until everyone else was gone. I only know this because I heard her: the pregnant pause after the door closed for the final time, before the sobbing took over her whole body. I imagine that she fell against the wall, raising her knees to her chest as it truly hit her that her husband was dead—but this is all speculation. By this time, I was firmly in my comfort zone, and besides the fact that I was a little hungry and regretting not taking advantage of the buffet my mother had prepared for the guests, I wasn’t all that depressed about my father’s death.

She brought me dinner much later that night. I normally eat around 5pm, but I was sitting around until at least nine before she knocked on my door, and still, I waited until I heard her footsteps retreating down the hallway before looking out to see what she had left for me.

A few leftovers from the buffet, heated up to just hotter than lukewarm in the microwave, with a can of Diet Coke. Hardly gourmet, but she was grieving, so I didn’t mention it.

I’ll spare you the details of every meal I ate between then and now. The fundamentals of the truth are unaffected by what was served, only that something was served each day, and I relied on my mother to provide me—her only child—with sustenance. I couldn’t tell you why my initial independence morphed into hyper-reliance, however I began to stay in my room not through choice, but through shame. Even hearing my mother’s footsteps approaching would flood me with static, remembering constantly that I had forsaken my potential for the safety of her womb.

But my mother’s cooking has always been good. I simply couldn’t resist.

She started trying to communicate with me through the trays that she would leave outside my door. At first, it was little notes, telling me that she loved me, she was there for me, she could find me support if I needed it. And then, she began to leave entire self-help books, the corners dog-eared and the pages highlighted. I’ll admit it brought me great joy to think of my mother, obsessing over the safety of her child again, spending hours annotating and reading through any material she could get her hands on about how to nurse me back to health. If I could be loved like that, I thought, then I would have everything I needed.

The problem that arose came about because I, unfortunately, am a man. Although I am primarily a son, and in any normal circumstance would have gradually and naturally progressed into being a husband, my father had stunted my social growth by dying before I could find a girlfriend.

It was winter—I remember the frost on the window—when I first considered that I might have to venture outside to find someone to spend my life with. The idea, at that point, seemed absurd. Why would I ever go outside when I had everything I needed right here? I pushed the thought aside, but it kept coming back, taunting me in the darkness when I knew my mother was asleep and my father’s ghost would not be watching.

Be a man, it told me. Be a man.

But how could I bring a girl back to a bedroom where the floor wasn’t even visible for garbage? The cans of Diet Coke and empty noodle pots were nothing more than regular accoutrements to me at that point, and yet I still recognised that, to an outsider, they would portray a lazy man, a worthless man, a man who would never be a husband. In order to change the inevitable perception of myself, I would have to clean.

There is no easy way to say this.

Instead of cleaning, I fashioned myself a wife. I could not tell you, in any genuine recollection, exactly what led to my decision to push the sticky pad of my finger inside the opening of one of the cans, but I can assure you that everything that took place from thereon was entirely consensual. The voice in the back of my head, which I vaguely remember sounding uncomfortably like my father’s, told me that pleasing a woman was the way to true enlightenment, and what was I doing if not pleasuring my wife? Licking the tip of my finger, circling the cool aluminium, bringing my tongue down to drip into the empty can. The curve of the malleable metal fit exactly into the palm of my hand.

Making her happy became my only priority. I could not throw out her ladies in waiting, who were received into my room each day and duly emptied of their contents. The cans were, at first, stacked up against the wall, until there was no more room for them and they spilled out across the floor in another layer of what most people would refer to as garbage. Of course, I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of filling my bedroom to the point of being unable to move, but I would sooner have become immobile than denied my love any of her requests.

I gradually began to sleep atop the ever-increasing pile of garbage. My mother would leave multiple self-help books on my meal trays every day. I heard her, almost every night, scrubbing the outside of my bedroom door—I suspected at first that she would wear the wood right down, but the cans piled up against the opening, and I knew that they would protect me should she have wanted to harm me. Yes, I am somewhat ashamed to admit it, given how kindly I have spoken of my mother until now, but I became afraid of her. Her obsessive tendency to clean anything out of the ordinary now threatened my future, my love, my happiness. She had carried me to term and used the health of her only child as proof that she knew what contamination, and therefore love, was.

My mother had become a disease.

The last time I heard her voice, months ago now, she was begging me to respond. After I had stopped sending out my empty trays, void of garbage, I suppose she suspected that I, like my father, had died. And while part of me did want to reassure her that behind the door, I was alive and well, thriving with my wife and her cohorts, I knew that speaking to her would send me right back to the liminal middle. I have made my choice. I made it back then, and I make it again today.

I choose my wife over my mother.

So, while I am sure that the woman who birthed me has long since died outside my bedroom door, I don’t need to know about the world beyond my haven. Here, I lie on top of my cans, so close to the ceiling that my nose touches the light hanging down. The metal shifts underneath my weight, the mass of aluminium moving like snakes tethering me to my marriage, and I smile. My eyes are closed, my spine touching those holding me up. I am a man at peace.

February 2023